Creating a repo is self-service, but pay attention and change the default configuration of the notifications so that email goes to issues@openwhisk.apache.org and not to dev@openwhisk.apache.org. Also note that the tool will automatically inject "openwhisk" into the repo name, so don't do it yourself and get a redundantly long name.
You create the repo here https://gitbox.apache.org/setup/newrepo.html.
After the repo is created, you need to enable it for TravisCI.
After that is done, you can write a .asf.yaml file (see git - .asf.yaml features) to configure most aspects of the repo. An every decreasing handful of things still need to be done by opening a JIRA ticket. Here is an example ticket from before .asf.yaml existed to document how we like to configure the gitrepos.