I've thrown a basic wiki page together that provides an overview of what we're doing with the requests_refactor branch, why we're doing it, what works, what doesn't work, and how to set the branch up on your machine. You may find it here:
https://github.com/boto/boto/wiki/Requests-Refactor-Branch
We'd love to have some other people poking at this to help us figure out what works, what doesn't, and what could be improved. A lot of the issues we run into are minor things that can be fixed very easily, so the barrier to entry for helping with the effort is pretty reasonable.
I'll try to keep this wiki page up to date with setup instructions and what we find works/doesn't work.
Greg