For the new contributors:

If you already have ASF JIRA account New contributors should register an account at https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/Dashboard.jspa and send out an introduction email to the project's s dev mailing list (subscribe) with a request for contributors permissions. Committers should handle this request and grant contributor access to a new community member.

If you do not have ASF JIRA account, mention this in the introduction email along with preferable username and one of the PMC members will create the account for you and provide permissions.