Personally, When I see this topic come up it's always a sort of "Here's my idea! and then wait for approval to start?". What can be done to empower motivated people like Alex to just do it?
These kinds of proposals would be much more successful if Alex were able to come to the mailing list with a fully functioning demo using live data that could be commented on and iterated on by the community.
My suggestion, is that the site maintainers make available some portion of the live data and resources to anyone who wants to have a crack at this. I can see that it has already been started to some degree here: