Have you considered a top-level post, possibly by you but even better by Matt from Tricycle, saying:
"Hello! I am the official contact for Less Wrong administration. If you have something you want to code for the site, message me and I will tell you whether you have official permission and whether it will get added when you are done. The answer is probably yes.
Here is the language you should code in, the standards you should follow, and so on. Here's where you can find the rest of the open-source code to see what you should be integrating it with. And here is the process to get your code running and up on the site when it is done, even if that process is just "email it to me".
In the comments to this post, please discuss your programming projects for Less Wrong, check that they're community-supported, and recruit people to help with them. If you can't program, this would also be a good place to suggest projects and recruit people who can."
Then stick a permalink to it similar to the "About" link going to Eliezer's first explanatory post.
All this information is sort of available right now, but not in one place and not with explicit permission to work on things, so the trivial inconveniences add up.
We'd tried to make that stuff clear from https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong/wiki
[sad face]
In my humble opinion the population of those who will follow through with site improvements is small enough that that link doesn't deserve a very prominent position. It's linked from the About page (and better linked now than it was a few mins ago).
One of the things that holds new contributors back is that the original Reddit code… is really ugly and isn't covered by unit tests. We've (Trike) poked it forwards but never taken the (huge amount of) time required t...
I've been browsing LessWrong less often as of late, and I believe that one of the reasons is because I don't want to get all excited all over a new insightful LW post, only to discover that it's a meetup in a city that I'm not even in.
And for newbies to the site in particular, they're not going to see all the awesomeness of this site if they simply look at the frontpage and think it's a community just for meetups.
I'm sure meetup discussions can go somewhere prominent. Maybe a separate section can be devoted to them.