I have this suggestion there are times when a code base of a "thing" is not update anymore (like the lear developer lost interest or can't continue working), or times when the documentation is little outdated even that the code is fine.
When a lead developer lost interest, it also will not point to the useful forks if there are any one, you will have look if you search and find the actual current fork.
So I suggest this, crates take from github code, why not make a rust-community organization, and start transferring repos there (yeah it will take time), then developers could give/request access, and if the original autor lost interest, doesnt want to update the docs and so on the persons in the organization could make it work again, or update it, or transfer to another organization like rust-community-deprecated (don't know).
But I will also suggest a rust-community-tutorials.
Anyway, there are "organizations", I think they could help in centralize things without the original developers losing own right of each crate.
Have you seen the "policy for rust-lang crates" RFC (#1242)? It was merged recently and suggest the Github organizations "rust-lang-nursery" and "rust-lang-deprecated". Sounds like the official version to your community version
Haven't read (before) it, but it I think the organizations are there to be used hehe. I quote something related some of you should know Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!.
Emphasizing rust-lang crates may alienate some in the Rust community, since it means that certain libraries obtain a special "blessing". This is mitigated by the fact that these libraries also become owned by the community at large.
For that one, I think the name instead of nursery could just be rust-std.
For all the other people that just want to save his crate or app with rust, there could be rust-community which is not an endorse of rust, but of the community of rust, so anyone that has some code could join .
And yeah, it will provide almost all people with a rust code a organization on their profile page.
See that I'm after a more community wide central repository.
For example a place where one can also do good usage of a organization could be this this Posting example code | Lift Project | Assembla where you could apply better a organization with a base for error report where all just fork in the own user and then submit, it will help know all the examples just following the fork list, instead of have 100>lift web projects that just report a bug.
yes in github you can still filter by lang... but instead when you enter a profile of a person there, you will see that it also code on rust just from the organizations. without see each contributed repo what it is.
I don't want to rain on the parade, but this sounds more like a graveyard to me.
There's good reasons not to run things under an umbrella-organization:
Open source work has a lot to do with the persons behind them, I would be wasting much of my effort by working in a non-descript organization
Github is already a neutral bucket that flags Rust code. Why have another neutral bucket that indicates Rust code?
Finally, this sounds a lot like you want to solve a different problem: loss of governance to projects. The problem here is not that it is usually hard to take projects over. The problem is that it is hard to find people to take them over. There's whole foundations founded around that problem (e.g. the Apache Foundation) and they are very hesitant to take on new projects, especially small ones.
I'm not sure how an automated org how yours would solve that.
Finally, a community-wide organization as an elaborate contact book carries less and less information the more people join.