I'm a programmer, not a bioinformatician, but I stumbled across your site and thought I'd say something to keep the list active :)
GNU started with RMS. He gave us programming/administration tools to play with. Linux started with Linus. He released an operating system for us to play with. You need someone great in the field to release something for everyone to 'play with'. Then people start sending patches...
I know this is chicken-egg, but someone needs to point this out, since I haven't seen this brought up in the papers or the website.
And you might consider merging into the bios.net effort mentioned already. Together, you just might reach the critical mass for things to take off. Consider this like when people jumped off the HURD project to come together and make linux work.
Dan