Is this group still active? Does it need some new blood? I might be interested.
Now that Drupal 7 is out, I continue to be embarrassed by the core Drupal Forum. In fact, I'm not even going to talk about the "Forums". What I want to see is a module that fosters building a Community. Instead of focusing on exactly which features Drupal Forum is missing compared to PHPBB or VBulletin (which is still a valid discussion to have), I would rather focus on something more fundamental: community building.
Imagine that you want to create a community site where members (or the general public) can post and comment on issues (Think of the new US Gov House of Representative initiatives as examples). We need a way to moderate discussions and let important topics percolate to the top of the queue. Look at other community sites, such as Slashdot, or Stack Overflow (etc). These are mostly self-moderated discussion sites where posts can be rated, reported, voted, etc. Important posts get promoted and spam/inappropriate posts disappear. Members have reputation. This is what you need to a real community site. Not just a port of PHPBB or VBulletin.
How can we do something like that with Drupal? Sure, there is the FiveStar module with Voting API. Maybe the Flag module for marking inappropriate posts. Maybe some sort of reputation module, such as Karma.
But how do we all get it to work together in a smooth way that regular people can install onto their site. With Drupal 7 we now have Distributions. There is also becoming more support for the Features modules. So maybe the solution is to put together some existing modules, with a bit of custom module "glue" and make a distribution or feature out of it.
I have 14+ years of experience running various community sites. And I believe that community discussions are becoming more and more important. It's a niche that Drupal does not serve well at all. I've messed around with all of the various addons to Forum (Advanced Forum, etc) for a couple of years and am not happy with the result. You can find posts going back several years (including a good post by webchick) about the lack of the Drupal forum system. There is a lot of work to be done to bring it all together into something easy to use (end users) moderate and manage.
Is anybody else interested in getting involved with me on something like this? Is there some other Drupal group I should be looking at? If this is the right place to start, then I can continue with more specific discussions. I will try to attend the Forum BOF tomorrow evening at DrupalCon Chicago (Thursday 3/9/11 at 5:45) to see if anybody else is interested. Come share your opinions. Let's improve this area of Drupal!