The LCN Fiction Universe, Collaborative world building Options

[P.P.A.]

It would appear that a lot of us have trouble keeping up motivation while writing fiction of any sort.
From my experience with forum RPs, developing a story or a world together with others is a great boost to productivity and the longevity of a story. If a project falls dormant, sooner or later someone is overcome by a fit of nostalgia and revives it, waking up the others. It can also inspire other things: if one wishes to experiment with a new medium (program a game, draw something, etc.), the scenario of a cherished RP readily lends itself to it—as a setting, as lore, as a rich collection of motifs.

I propose taking a few pages from that book and creating a LCN-own framework for fiction. A universe within or a theme around we all could base our writing and whatever else we feel like. Not exactly collaborative writing (as once proposed here)—just a framework for each of our individual efforts.

This fictional universe of any scale—a world, a geographic area, a shared lore—would be as a skeleton which to flesh out.
It could be the history of a country or region, with a timeline set in stone, noting different cultures, wars, remarkable individuals, none of which would be more than mere dates and names until we wrote their stories.
We could create a map, and gradually draw borders and take a closer look at certain places during certain times, à la Strangereal from Ace Combat. Or do the opposite, outline a story, and in our narrations expand on the lore or focus on side stories off the paths of the protagonists.

Everyone's ideas, expansions, and creations would be adopted into the canon (perhaps after brief discussion), and the others could then incorporate these new facts into our own works.

How do you like this idea? And how restrictive or large-scale do you want this framework to be? Should we try to tell a (his)tory from different perspectives and before different backgrounds? Or rather decide on a few constants (geography, creatures, mechanics) and develop them each, creating distant islands which slowly grow together to a grand whole?
Also, should we start from scratch, abstract from reality (imagine there being an additional continent on our Earth), or seek inspiration from DHE?