Life of a Nin had a post On Raiders and raiding which discusses summer slumps in raiding and lack of progress. He mentions the idea of a large scale raiding alliance as a possible solution. You stay in your guild, but raid with people from the raiding alliance at the times that work for you on the raids you want to run. One example of this in action is Leftovers Community Raiding. For further reading, see the WoW Insider article.
I really like the idea, but thinking about the overhead scares me. The loot system would have to be 100% impartial. If you have the points or win the roll you get it. If there is even the slightest room for favoritism the whole thing would fall apart.
How are troublemakers handled? In the relatively small guilds I’ve been in, there have been a number of disruptive people. Sometimes it was just a bad night. Sometimes it was a regular occurrence. How do they avoid blacklisting someone for having a bad night while keeping the troublemakers from stirring things up?
It looks like Leftovers is an Alliance group on a role-playing server. Looking at their setup tempts me to pull Flint out of retirement and give it a try. Sadly, Flint would lose the provable distinction of having leveled on a PvP server as a holy priest. I’m also not sure if I want to get into raiding on him again. It’s definitely something to think about.