My 2 cents on this is that a workshop area might be good as a place to float project ideas and obtain suggestions -- if there is enough interest, decisions can be made about mailing lists, hosting the project, and what ever. Something like an RFC (request for comments) or CFP (call for participation) area for new projects.

Now, I wouldn't necessarily want newest nodes flooded with various project's adminstrative discussions and chit-chat, so perhaps if some kind of thread subscription were available, then only the toplevel node for a new project would show up in new nodes, and after that only subscribers to the project node would be notified of further posts to that node (maybe a new subscribe nodelet that would automatically receive msg's about posts to any subscribed threads).

At any rate, the value of the workshop area in this scheme would not be hosting projects and providing CVS and such things, but only to expose a new project idea to a large number of monks and open it up for discussion and interested parties. When and if it is ready it could then be moved to sourceforge or elsewhere.

Now, one thing I really like in your post is the notion of the project manager(s) developing sets of task assignments with related skill levels (and possibly even some discussion and hints for the tasks that are judged to be at the beginner to intermediate levels). That seems a great way to encourage newcomers and help them get their feet wet and hands dirty gaining experience working on real projects.