As for karma for fixing problems: I promise to upvote 20 comments of anybody engaged in the successful home page creation (great idea). I would like to help myself, but have almost no idea how it can be done. It would be great if there was some basic description for inexperienced LWers of how changes are designed and implemented - maybe I could do something even with my very limited abilities, but I'd need some initiation.
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.