Speaking of which, should we reach out to the digikam team and see if we can help in some way?
I think it is not a bad idea.
https://cgit.kde.org/digikam.git/tree/AUTHORS
Gilles would be a good start.
I sent an email to Gilles and copied you @patdavid
There was a discussion recently of moving the user mailing list to something more web-accessible than a mailing list. However the usual reasons (combination of high activation energy and different opinions quickly turning confrontational) prevented it from going forward.
Also the website is pretty much unmaintained and needs to be update to drupal 7 soon. Therefore we are looking for someone who would like to do that and generally improve the website at discretion (digikam-users - digikam.org : Webmaster wanted...).
@rasimo we’d be happy to host a category here for digikam. Gilles said he doesn’t have time to follow a forum. It might be worth noting that you can use our forum software completely via email.
I don’t know anything about drupal, but of they’re interested in going to a static site, I’d be happy to help.
I am going to follow up with an email to digitkam-users to see if there is any interest.
This is exactly the sort of thing we can probably help with! 
I’ll defer to @paperdigits and see what comes of his communication here, but I’m available as a resource for him if he wants also.
@paperdigits - it might be worth answering on that digikam-users email about a new webmaster wanted. We could possibly handle a drupal install on the same webserver we’re hosting the main site on, but a static site would be much better if they didn’t need something dynamic.
[addendum] - after looking through the site quickly, there doesn’t appear to be much dynamic content to worry about, either…
@paperdigits I was proposing pixls.us as replacement for digikam-users as well with exactly the argument that you can use discourse just like a mailing list. The enthusiasm wasn’t big, so I didn’t follow up on it. The "problem is that the “current solution just works”.
Some background: Digikam is/was a KDE program which is migrating away towards pure QT5. So all related services (webhosting, version control, bugs, mailing list) runs on KDE infrastructure. Also there is a huge code base and a rather small core team, which is very much occupied with the code itself. Gilles does the administration like releases, GSoC and other stuff, but naturally tries to keep that part of the work minimal to have more time for the code. I would personally love to see digikam get some nice website of your making, but I don’t know whether going away from KDE is possible (I guess there is also politics involved there, which is not exclusively constructive). There definitely is not much dynamic there, the only update things are releases and the occasional blog post by @dmpop.
Simon, I thought pixls.us could help digiKam dev team to understand what features photographers actually expect a DAM software to have which would help the developers to free up their time by throwing some parts of code away and focusing on what’s wanted.
@rasimo thanks for the background information. I’ll try and be as diplomatic as possible, as it sounds like we have the same goal: take support and community outreach off the developer’s plates and give them more time to develop!
@paperdigits @patdavid I hope you guys do understand the amount of support that will need to be handled.
Please sign up to digikam-users@kde.org and look at Components for digikam to understand what you are getting yourselves into.
Sure, being connected to actual photographers is certainly a good thing. However I doubt “throwing away code” (whatever that actually means) is a reasonable possibility to free up time. There is already narrow focus at the moment, and it is on stability and cross-platform compatibility. It’s not like there is time spent all over the place for various features.
Totally agree, digikam is huge. However that is true for the code-base and issue-backlog, it is not the same for the website and the user mailing list. There is definitely very low volume on the website and the user mailing list isn’t that much either (excluding some topics that sometimes get out of hand when discussions start, but that’s contained).
I like that view of an ideal DAM tool posted by @chris awhile ago and wanted to paste it here before it got lost.
I signed up earlier in anticipation of some possible discussions over there.
This doesn’t feel so insurmountable. I feel that one of the things we can do here is to provide back-end support for projects that would like to interact with photographers overall, and (as @paperdigits said) to help take community outreach and public-facing infrastructure off their hands if they’d like.
(I’m not sure if we’re the best qualified to step in as a support role, but we can certainly try.)
Looking at the site, I’m confident that @paperdigits (with any help he needs from the rest of us) could handle a migration to a static website and build system.
Let’s see if we can get a discussion going on their mailing list. I’d love to be able to help out if we can!
Thank you @patdavid and @paperdigits for your hard work on digiKam website. If there is anything in this world I can help you with please let me know. I would be happy to help you out if I can.
As a follow up, we can’t host an official support sub here, as it must be on KDE infrastructure in order for digiKam to remain a KDE project.
Also a big thank you from my side! Especially for your speed and persistence: You immediately took up the necessary requirements and followed through. I am excited to see the first results.
I hoped the whole topic of migrating the user mailing list/official support channel would be delayed, as it is a sensible one - now it looks like it will never happen anyway. Nevertheless if the comment section of the new website is backed by discuss.pixls.us, it might still be sensible to create a digiKam category here, just for structuring. This doesn’t make it official, it is just an involved community talking about digiKam.