This may sound a bit hypocritical but maybe we should start considering extending the reach of the nixers.net community activities by "advertising" them.

I'm not sure how this would be done without compromising the quality or "branding" of the community.
However, it would be nice to see how this develops.

This is still a new idea, maybe we could start with a sort of button that we could add to our website.
Sorta' like the "fork me" button or the internet defense league button.
Sort of like:
https://github.com/blog/273-github-ribbons
http://tholman.com/github-corners/
Maybe we can also tag our screenshots with watermarks.

This is just a concept in my mind but it would be cool when others see anything that comes out of here and think, "Those people are all working on great stuffs in this community".

This, however, will not increase participation. What will increase participation are incentives.
For those who watched my podcast on webcasts you would know what my surprise was, and it's still mostly valid if you still want it.