I appreciate that there's work involved but I was wondering whether there's any way of getting a faster decision and implementation of Special Interest Groups?

This is already in hand with the appointing of someone whose job on the forum is to just to look after the development of the groups and the training and support of the group leaders. Until now, I have been looking after the groups as part of my role, but I recognise that the groups' development has been a little neglected as I have got busier.

Olliekitten has kindly offered to spend her time looking after the groups as her sole responsbility so the groups can have more priority.

Outcome

We will now use the suggestions forum for new groups to be raised and discussed.

Update 2

We have run in to a serious scalability issue with the current way we implement group forums. We are discussing this with the developers but we are looking at a 2-3 months more for this to be fixed (hopefully!). We will attempt to still launch groups but will be unable to speed up process as requested, sorry.