I'm definitely feeling the push to show that I'm doing something on my 'Hub account. I can see why it'd be tempting to go and reinvent a wheel to give that impression.
To make it worse, GitHub only occasionally shows commit activity on repos belonging to other people. I have plenty of side-projects going over on a communal account at http://github.com/smashcon. If I work on some of those repos for a couple of weeks, however, to the casual observer it appears as if I haven't been doing anything at all.
(The canonical answer appears to be "fork and use pull requests", but at this point in the project they're just too clumsy for little benefit, particularly each only has a single committer.)
On the other hand, if you get someone else to commit on a project you start, people will think of you when they think of the project. Case in point: until I looked at the history in-depth I always thought of pengwynn when I looked at this project:
To make it worse, GitHub only occasionally shows commit activity on repos belonging to other people. I have plenty of side-projects going over on a communal account at http://github.com/smashcon. If I work on some of those repos for a couple of weeks, however, to the casual observer it appears as if I haven't been doing anything at all.
(The canonical answer appears to be "fork and use pull requests", but at this point in the project they're just too clumsy for little benefit, particularly each only has a single committer.)