How similar is this project to open source hacker culture, and how similar to the culture of academia?
This is a part of our experiment: we are trying to marry the two cultures. So far, it seems to be working pretty well. On the one hand, we want to teach academics and other professionals to work in a strongly collaborative way and adopt the principles and ethics articulated in, for example, Eric Raymond’s essays “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and “Homesteading the Noosphere” (essays we recommend you read, if you have not yet done so). So this will be a bottom-up, collaborative, distributed wiki project. It is not the command-and-control, bureaucratic sort of project with which many academics are familiar. On the other hand, we want to make a special place for experts to get involved as senior members of the community. Really, this is not that different from open source software projects, because those projects have senior participants who decide what’s goes into and what stays out of the code. This only means that the hacker notion of a meritocracy on the basis of visible work must be
