Short answers:

elessar said:

Harmy's Despecialized v1.0 of the original Trilogy has been released. These were based off of HD TV broadcasts and other DVD sources?
Now that the Blurays have been released, Harmy is re-undertaking the mammoth task to give us an even better version 2.0 of his despecialized work.

Exactly. 2.0 is based on the Blu-rays, which has better fine detail than the HDTV and slightly better black levels.

I often see Harmy refer to receiving reference frames to conduct his work. What are these and where do they come from?

A variety of sources, mostly private collections.

Also, for the layman can someone give a rough idea of how Harmy does these re-edits? Does he edit scenes frame by frame? Can batch changes be made to a scene once he figures out how he wants to edit it?

It's mostly frame-by-frame stuff. This is an example of how some of the changes had to be made.

I see people refer to workprints and reels. Is there a link or a thread where one can go to view a culmination of these, to see what the current status of the project is in?

Harmy has been releasing sections for scrutiny, but I don't think there's a master page and they are still pretty rough. Someone distributed one with one of Harmy's jokes and complained about the swearing he added to Star Wars!