The huge potential of cross-community collaboration

I saw a post describing an interesting idea today. This is an idea I've thought about many times myself and tried to nurture and encourage here with FOSSLC in terms of having events with multiple communities represented, hosting videos and content related to multiple communities, and more. That idea is cross-community collaboration. The potential here is enormous - specialization and trade - open source style.

For example: Think of the value that would be created by a cross platform SIP client that could embed in a web browser? A joint project between people from Mozilla, Asterisk, and possible one or two other smaller communities such as Twinkle could accomplish this very quickly.The same plugin/library might be designed in such a way to be reusable in Eclipse. Before long, global communication is cheap, easy, cross platform, and based on open standards.

I don't think this model is the norm today. Our Freeseer project is my sense of a more common scenario. We're working to be glue between Python, Qt, Gstreamer, and Icecast to create a free and standards based video broadcasting platform. Our project is like many where someone with an itch is scratching it but not necessarily a formal collaboration between communities.

Someone from the Blender community noted the same thing. They suggested trading artistic talent and art for programming prowess. The net result would be more features in software like Blender as this case, and better looking open source applications and games.

Research projects and start-ups would potentially form out of some collaborations creating even more value.

I think this is a great idea. How do we make it happen?