Collaborative web site for engineering development

Good point!
Reminds me of an IR&D project I had the opportunity to shut down ten years ago. This IR&D group had somehow talked management into funding a 10 manyear effort to prepare for the next contract based on the latest OOD tools. They didn't want to let previous experience get in the way of a resume building learning experience so they started with a clean slate and empty minds using a tool that was picked because it had a nice visual interface. When I was put on the project to find out what was going on they had compiled a three inch thick volume of circle and line drawings representing their work. The first question I asked after some study was, "Now what do you do with it?". The answer was that this was design documentation that would be placed on the shelf and left there because there was no way to get from their design to code. When I noticed that each object breakdown starting with the very top had no rhyme or reason, I asked what rules they used to define the relationship between objects the answer was that the only rule was there could not be more than nine objects or less than five. Why? Because that was a tool limitation on the maximum number of nodes in a drawing. And their response to anybody questioning the whys of their design was that they had spent too much time argueing over it to change it and that we obviously didn't understand cool OOD. Luckily we lost the bid for the contract this project was suppposed to help and the IR&D group had all found other companies to work for within several months. My review of the whole project was that the IR&D group wanted to play with an open ended tool without being encumbered by any extranous rules. The fact that the project could never have been finished using their methodology didn't matter.
And the same has you, I have seen and been forced to use tools upon which millions of dollars had been spent and being spent that solved a problem that didn't exist in the first place and that there certainly were much cheaper and better alternatives for by the time the tool was usable years later.
On the other hand, I have used tools both simple and complex that provided capabilities or solved problems that would have just been too difficult to do otherwise.
Hard to tell if InnerTransit.org is going to be useful or not at this time. It contains the best aspects of all the tools that I have ever used. The only way to tell if this is the tool for the job is to use it. InnerTransit.org is almost ready. I inserted the last major section yesterday, CVS source file control. I need to finish off source file control and then clean-up and implement the help function. It should be ready by the end of the month. Then we can start the projects that I am really interested in.
What projects is everybody interested in starting? I would like to start on a moon based manufacturing cell capable of partial self replication.
Mitchell James
All I'm worried about is that the tools being used will become the
reason for the project existence, instead iof the project goals. I
have seen many projects, open source, and commercial where people
spend so much time acquiring, updating, and customizing the tools that
they never get near to the project goals.
Bill