On aesthetics: although I like the StackOverflow nod, I think the color scheme is a little too 'grey'. Background is grey, headers are grey, tags are grey, buttons are grey. Don't know if other HNers have the same sense.
Specific improvements:
- on the "Add Project" page, you could make the text fields a little bit bigger
- rather than picking the # of hours you think it would take for 2-3 people, why don't you use the fibonacci-like sequence used in Story Point / Planning Poker estimation. E.g., it's a scale of complexity: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 25, 50 100. See planningpoker.com. You could also consider using a 'slider' here.
- After I posted my clusterify project idea, I realized I had made a mistake in the Markdown. Can we get a preview feature? How about editing existing submissions? (I understand this is early stage :-))
- The mistake I made is that I thought that links that are on their own line should be linked automatically. I guess this isn't strict Markdown, but seems like a common enough convention in most text-to-html systems.
- Since this is code-focused, you could make google-code-prettify available for syntax highlighting (or something similar):
http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/
- The "vote up" feature should be available on the front page, rather than only being available in the right side "project control" section once you click on a project
- Speaking of, I think you should move "Project Controls" to the top of the project page. It's hard to find them on the right side.
Some "pie in the sky" new features to consider:
- Someone mentioned integration with code hosting services like Github: that could be very cool
- Having the project proposal be a Wiki rather than an original proposal with comments
- Google maps (or similar) integration to schedule meetings
I'm definitely going to keep visiting. It's a great idea. Keep it up. And if you're interested in working on a Python project, I've proposed one!