The Neo4j community is gearing up for the release of version 1.5, which promises significant performance improvements and changes to the core database engine. The new release will introduce a utility to generate GraphViz output from a Neo4j database, update Gremlin to version 1.2, and open GitHub issue tracking for all Neo4j projects. These changes aim to speed up performance, reuse space, and decrease database file size, while also making it easier for the community to contribute to the project by reporting issues directly on GitHub.