During KDE's goals AMA on Reddit, Debian's project leader suggested working on "specific strategies to help streamline these people [newcomers via distros] into contributing to KDE directly and/or assist them in making the $distro ↔ KDE experience better".

As I mentioned on that thread, relations and communications with distributions are usually handled by KDE's advisory board. Also, an initiative was undertaken by KDE to reach out to distros in the past, but from what I know it never really took off.

Can we come up with ideas on how to improve relationships with downstream distributions in a way that will make new contributors attracted to contributing upstream to KDE?
Can we provide clear paths and connections to distributions where they can redirect people to so they are introduced to the KDE community and start contributing in an effective manner?
In other words, can we make the downstream↔upstream gab smaller in terms of people looking to contribute to an improvement to KDE's software or to how it is used in their distros?