WPC-style puzzles in the U.S.
Talking with motris at the World Sudoku Championship (and talking with tigupine  before that) , we think that there may be an opportunity to have some sort of Nikoli-like puzzle club, with a periodical publication, for constraint-satisfaction puzzles such as seen in the World Puzzle Championship. I'm thinking of perhaps using the webcomic paradigm -- one puzzle released every day as a graphic image, then planning for a paper publication if it gets popular enough.

Pay the puzzle designers some amount of money based on "circulation" (unique visitors to the site, or whatever metric we can dream up).

The important thing here is that we want hand-made puzzles, not brainless sudoku cranks.  Each puzzle will receive author's credit.  The goal is not to make money, but to really build a puzzle community in the US, with designers and puzzlers.

But for such a project to really get off the ground, we need some designers.  motris and I designed a puzzle last night, but it will probably be boring with just the two of us.  So, go ahead and drop me a line if you're interested in making puzzles like these -- we'll be contacting you sometime this summer, after my current puzzle project is finished.