> I, for one, want to at least see, if not help, what small but interesting byte-size hurdles others encounter and how others can solve it in different ways, and all the discussion around it.
I've thought about this idea and I think without proper "project managers" (I don't mean someone with a project management degree - but just someone to coordinate all the efforts) it seems like it could be a total failure.
Here is an example: I have a C++ game engine that I need help with feature X. I think any C++ developer could come up with an implementation of X, but does the style fit my game engine? Does it interconnect with the rest of the engine? (of course ignoring the fact that any discussion of C++ would generate gigabytes worth of comments - I've read some of the newsgroup discussions on style alone...). You can't just be like "create a logging interface" without having studied the rest of the code base. It would be like trying to create a feature for Apache or Linux kernel - if we didn't study their code base and style anything we submit would be laughed out the room - not because what we did won't work or wrong but it doesn't fit with the rest of the code.
This is where the project managers come in - they already know the style and inner workings and take what you submit and hack it into the right style and push it into a SCM or push it upstream (or reject it). Personally I would feel more inclined to make contributions to the Linux kernel if there was a friendly middle man I could look over my work before it gets to Linus - only because I fear if I submit something stupid I'll get chewed out by Linus.
Even if this were to happen - I would not want to read 10k comments of tail call recursion optimization, smart pointer usage, or discussion of non-portable code that will work on 99% of systems except for AIX Unix and Blue Gene/Q.