Thanks to the help of the ASF Infrastructure team, Lucene4c now has a mailing list in addition to its Subversion repository.
If you're interested in what's going on please feel free to subscribe here. I'm actively recruiting more developers, and I just posted a status update and list of bite sized tasks to the list. Once we get JIRA set up I'll move the todo list there, but for now the mailing list will just have to do.
UPDATE: oh, and for those who were curious about what the status actually is and what tasks are currently out there but that aren't on the list, the archives appear to be working now, so here's a link to the message in question.