I think that fontforge's OpenFontLibrary (OFLB) integration along with Max Rabkin's ffhg plugin which adds some mercurial features open up a lot of interesting possibilities for working together on font sources in a distributed way...

We can take advantage of (lib)fontforge and its scriptability or use external tools and methodologies.

inkboard, abicollab, telepathy or verse can probably provide some inspiration.

Here are rough ideas on ways we could make it easier to use fontforge in a collaborative/distributed way.

• meld-like visual sfddiff features
• menu entries to commit to local or remote DVCS branches
• timed autosave to local branch
• easy visual review/retrieval of past commits and corresponding commit logs
• menu entry to visualise ancestry graph of the branch
• easy way to see which particular parameters/libs fontforge has been built with to work from the same base between contributors
• avahi-enabled advertising and browsing of local branches between contributors
• commit notifications to local network or common channel: jabber, IRC, microblogs
• integrated allocation/announcement mechanism to reduce duplication
• menu entry to launch screen sharing/whiteboard via VNC for direct mentoring
• FONTLOG creation helper script
• test suite launched regularly in a dedicated test branch
• repository history and statistics view to facilitate tracking progress
• common Unicode coverage statistics per block
• access to metadata in the web view of the repository: glyph comments from the fontforge sources for example
• common catalog of scripts
• improved nautilus integration: mime-types, etc

Comments and thoughts welcome.