Based on the goals you explained before, I think it makes sense anyways.
This would greatly help the attendance, from my point of view. Be aware that not all companies allow their employees to attend video-conferences not relevant for the core business during business time (e.g. I actually work for a transport company with most of the IT infrastructure running on proprietary softwares).
The main issue with this type of approach is the one I will explain below.
I don’t think so. I think it is a good idea to associate a face to a nickname, as it strengthens the community and the bonds within each people composing it.
Good idea, but this would be an additional goal, not the main goal of the hangouts. You may see them as “training hangouts” instead of “community hangouts”.
Basically, as far as I may see it, the main problem for the community hangouts is that the community is sparse on the planet Earth in different continents (and even in the same continent, in different timezones). What can be “out of business” hours for me may be “business time” for someone else in the world. Plus, everyone of us have other interest in life (not me, but someone has also a family and some children to attend to), so not every times are optimal, if you don’t want to get divorced ;).
In this case, my suggestion would be to create “local” community hangouts, so to be able to cover up 2/3 timezones each and (this is also mandatory, IMHO) to record each local hangout. In this way, the recordings could be viewed from other timezones and requests may be asked for a particular argument to be explained again on a different local hangout. The cons on this approach are that devs and people involved in the community have to organize several hangouts each month instead of only one and be available also on strange times of the day. I don’t know what are the constraints for an hangout per month, but I will re-evaluate also this point. Maybe one single hangout, not to be given up and mandatory, every 3 months may be sufficient to share ideas and organize some work.
I do not want to say to anyone how to deal with his/her job or life, I was just sharing ideas 