If you want to get things done, you don't give a talk about it at a conference. You make the right friends, find out who's involved with it, and then make the improvements. It's just like anything else, and it has nothing to do with programming, programmers, or any other technology.

Which major Perl site have you run, by the way? It's really easy to snipe from the sidelines, but when you actually do it you'll find out things aren't so easy. If you are using something like Pair.com, for instance, you can't just do whatever you want with the server. Other people have responsibilities beyond the free services they are giving you. A lot of these people are doing a lot more in the Perl world, and you'll have to choose between them working on perl, or making some website have a spiffy feature or a different color.

So, it comes down to this: you can start your own site and do things anyway that you like. Stop complaining about what other people aren't doing and get to work. Join the club of people who do things. If you're afraid to even have a suggetion shot down, you don't have the stomach for what you'll have to endure once people get to talk about what you're trying to do rather than the other way around.