I want to echo I agree with you @Pike on the tool conversation. I usually flag tools conversations as being an easier route than actually addressing problems. Having said that… I have believed for a very long time that the lack of a central place (that search engines can find!) to:
a) Talk
b) Create Groups (organically according to need: could be regional, could be functional, could be experimental)
c) Talk in, and invite others to those groups
d) Highlight our own work, be it through published posts, links to commits, badges etc.
Makes the community feel ‘hard to find, and even harder to join, and then super-hard to share what our accomplishments are to people outside the community’.
I feel a community ‘hub’ would be game changing, because it would be central, it’s about tools, yes and I know… that feels like a hard sell, but it’s not as hard as trying to put people in all the places where new contributors might turn up, combat the abandoned-dist list syndrome, isolation and firehose of questions. I mention Drupal because that’s been an experience of mine: the contrast in trying to find people, projects, like-initiatives and opportunities (even for brief collaboration) is way, way way easier there. Also, because it’s built on an open source project, it doesn’t feel so ‘custom’ to ask for changes - or tweak for improvements.
So that’s basically why, in this case I feel talking tools is unavoidable.