The greatest thing happened today

Sorry for the interruption to the expected series of posts, but, ironically, I'm a little too off-schedule to write about scheduling.

But I had this fanastic idea! What if: a bookseller, the head of a press, a publicist, a prolific poet, a published novelist, a professor at a highly regarded MFA program and a writing student (this is starting to sound like a bad joke) all sat down and discussed how to bring their community's writers together, creating a central meeting place to bring together big-name authors, midlist authors, local authors, unpublished authors and readers with intriguing events that go beyond the passive reading? This would create a line of benefits from the casual reader through the writers up to bookstores and publishers.
Well that happened today. However, our bookseller was the owner of the local indie, the poet doubled as the MFA professor, the novelist was my author who's published through an small indie press, the press represented was non-profit, and yours truly combined publicist and student into one inexperienced observer for an hour-long meeting.
The result? Some seriously credible talk for implementing a weekly writer's program at the indie. The plan is to alternate open workshop/discussion meetings with guest author readings. The workshop meetings would open with discussion of next week's author's work, segueing into an "immersion" workshop, wherein participants would produce a completed piece--short prose or poem--by the end.
The benefits are universal. Avid readers get to add a new sense to their enjoyment of a book by hearing it read by the author. Unpublished authors have a regular time and place where they know they can come in and refine their art, either through direct workshop or by hearing from the professionals. The bookseller gets customers, of course, and the author not only has the satisfaction of knowing his/her work is being discussed, but will get free exposure to sell more books, making the publisher happy.
Definitely on the small scale, but from what my newbie but quick-learning eyes have shown over the past 6 months, it's practically a revolutionary idea. I subscribe to author blogs, writing blogs, literary journal blogs, publisher blogs, bookseller blogs, book marketing blogs, editorial blogs, agent blogs, even freelance writing blogs. Other than news blogs like galleycat, they stick to their specialties 99% of the time.
With so many great minds producing fresh, interesting content, why aren't they combining their areas with current, innovative dialogue to figure out how to surmount the rising wall of difficulties facing this industry?
I take today's meeting as a sign for the future, and have faith that similar dialogue is going on in other areas, but that it's quiet, like today's conversation. But as we keep adding voices to the crowd, the volume will only get louder and that's when change happens.