The Mass Driver Project

Dean,

For the past year or so I've been mulling over this
same issue and like you, am looking at putting
together a colloborative open content project for my
master's work. I've been very interested in this
group hearing of the projects by both Mitchell James
and Paul Fernhout in which they have been trying to
some sort of colloborative engineering going on. I
have also studied the Artemis Society and PERMANENT as
they strive towards a more inclussive effort to
provide an area to stimulate ideas on space
development.

I have to agree a lot with observations by James
Mitchell on the his efforts. And I am hoping to learn
from his efforts. One of the important things I have
noticed in almost all these efforts is the drive to
continue the project AND the need to attract people to
the project.

All too often, people just assume that if they
build it, people will come. Sometimes they do, but
often times they don't. So what I've been looking
around at was a place that already had a strong base
of contributors and see if it could be expanded to
include these people into an effort to expand
knowledge on space related topics. About three months
ago, I finally found it at en.wikipedia.org. Judging
by the way you've set up your project, you look to be
familar with it already.

A spinoff of wikipedia is wikibooks.org. In this
project people are contributing in writing text books
together. It is this area where I see a lot of
potential of finally finding a place where you can
bring people together to colloboratively work
together. It is also this area where my thesis shall
concentrate on putting together a book on on space
studies. (more on that in a future date - still
working on the proposal!)

The large advantage I see here is that you have an
area already where thousands of users go and
contribute (wikipedia) that is helping to push its
users onto its sister project project (wikibooks). So
theoritically, you could have a larger audience to
contribute then one would have by "going-it-alone".
Of course, the minus is that you do give up some
control on being able to tweak the code behind the
project. Then again, you could always volunteer to be
a developer :)

My 2 pennies,

Ryan

--- Mitchell James
mejames@...