Here's a somewhat tangential suggestion: One way you might be able to build some energy in a community would be to host discussions where hypothetical interesting/valuable projects are fleshed out and scoped and people talk about what a reasonable bounty/prize would be for completing it if there was some sort of DIP fund available. This way you're not completely dependent on developers showing up and committing to dev projects before there can be any discussions, and it could seed the ecosystem with ideas for projects to tackle. Maybe set the beneficiary to an account that could hold funds to be used for dev bounties/prizes. The old DIP Community Proposals could be a pool of potential topics.