I think a regular call would be good, to share things like major updates, road map, upcoming events, etc. I know a lot of this gets posted in ~meta, but a live forum could be nice, too.

I feel the directon of SN is very much community-driven. There are many feature requests posted in ~meta, and in general discussed in comments all over the site. While directing developers to GitHub to log feature requests or bug reports works well, I don't think a stacker should have to have a GitHub account to make suggestions or offer feedback. That being said, I think a first-class mechanism within SN to submit feature requests, bug reports, and vote on them as a stacker seems like a good idea. This would allow the community to express their opinion on what they'd most like to see, without having to leave SN.

I think @k00b has already started doing this, but just setting expectations around PR feedback is good. It could take a while for a small team such as SN's to review PRs, so just ensuring contributors are aware is helpful.

A prioritized backlog of items for contributors to pull from would be nice. I don't think that should limit what contributors can work on, but it might help contributors find something meaningful to work on.

Related to (4) above, if the backlog could also be annotated with things like Good First Issue to help onboard new contributors, that would also be good I think.