@dominic About teamware, sorry that I didn't comment earlier. I saw the link to the Harry Potter parody book, and that turned out to be an internet rabbit hole, I didn't read the book but ended up digging through Wikipedia a lot.

The ideas you put in that thread were a lot about affordance theory and UX design. A "join this org" button or "too hard for me" button is a message sent to the community. I think it would help. I think we need to experiment with different models and see what happens.

My bet is that if you create a public discussion forum, owned-by-none yet owned-by-all, people will figure out what needs to be done and by whom. I believe they'll self-organize into some structure that makes sense for them.

One thing I think would make a lot of difference is to separate discussion forum from forks graph. A GH repo's default view is files+readme pertaining to one fork of that project (consider that the origin repo is also a "fork"). What if the default view were forks-graph + readme? I'm thinking that emphasizing one fork alone is bad because it tends to centralize efforts on that fork. The fact that GH makes cross-fork collaboration hard (at least because there isn't cross-fork discussion forum) tends to centralize discussions in one fork. If all forks are displayed equally, and if it's easy to navigate and utilize/install other forks, I think we would gain a lot more flexibility.