Most projects in launchpad do not use all of launchpad's services, they use offsirte services. Community users often know where the offsite serivice is, but do not have permission to set the project or series data. The project owner may be absent because he registered it to setup a mirror, but is not correctly the owner, he does not know about the community information. For example, the ubuntu contributors often needs to set the upstream bug contact, bug tracker, series branch, series filereleaseglob, and translation import.
One proposal is to allow any community user to set this information if it has never been set. In the case of a project owned by Registry Administrators (~registry), users should be permitted to correct information that is set. We may want to treat the case of absentee owners as a separate problem...instead of stepping on their rights, those projects should be given to registry admins.
An another solution would be to allow community members to join ~registry (or a new ad-hoc team) after signing the code of conduct. This way, no code will be required and vandalism could be easily avoided.