Yes! This is in the direction I think we need. During the impl period, one thing that I was frequently doing was a kind of "check in". I would just go over all the things that were "in flight" and ping each person involved. I had a spreadsheet where I tried to track the last time each person has been contacted. I frequently found people blocked on one thing or another who hadn't had time to mention it yet.
I would like to make this process much easier. Ideally, having a simple way to update your own status. Github doesn't make this any easier -- the fact that, e.g., you can't assign a GitHub issue to people outside of the rust-lang "team" is problematic.
In general, I think the most important point from both what you wrote and what @spastorino wrote is that it'd be nice if there was a bit more structure. For example, it'd be nice if you could "sign up" as working on something, and then have some regular check-in. I'd like to set expectations up front -- e.g., have some issues that are looking for someone with N hours per week to spend on it, and have others that are more suitable for "slowly hack on this over time", since people have different amounts of time available to spend.
Right now the "state of the art" when it comes to this are maintained tracking issues -- see e.g. the NLL tracking issue -- but obviously a lot of pieces of the puzzle are missing there.
It's important when talking about this stuff though not to overdesign. It's so easy to go crazy imagining how great things would be "if only" we had this whole complex setup. Then the bot or whatever you need to make it happen never happens. Probably something lo-tech -- I'm imagining a publicly editable google spreadsheet -- would actually suffice.
OTOH, stuff like @rfcbot has been transformative.