I've been thinking about making this a regular occurrence as well. ~ Monthly seem about right?
Is motivation for your PhD related project is primarily to facilitate "evidenced based decision making"? Also, do you have a link?
Monthly is great! It'd be great to have regular progress updates from all the people in this thread. I'm part of a group in London that has biweekly meetings to do just that, and I think it's a great way of motivating people.
About my PhD stuff, I can point you to papers, but I'm not sure that's what you have in mind. I do have a software prototype but it has not been released as of yet. So far, I have been demoing it to interested people over skype. (I should probably record a screencast. You know what, I'll take that as an action item for the next thread....
Whpearson recently mentioned that people in some other online communities frequently ask "what are you working on?". I personally love asking and answering this question. I made sure to ask it at the Seattle meetup. However, I don't often see it asked here in the comments, so I will ask it:
What are you working on?
Here are some guidelines