Nicely written article. One thing that is not mentioned is the need for an organizer, leader, or queen (using 'hive mind' terminology) to make collaborative projects that evolve over time work. - Andrew Lang

Good point. Do queens emerge naturally in such complex systems? Are some people "born leaders"? - Bora Zivkovic

I was actually thinking about a blog post about the wonders of benevolent dictatorship :) - Deepak Singh

Deepak, I am looking forward to your post. But you need to photoshop a crown on your head ;-) - Bora Zivkovic

I was going to put it on yours :-) - Deepak Singh

Done. As you can tell I agree with Andrew. http://mndoci.com/blog... - Deepak Singh

Andy is right - at least one person has to be deeply committed to keeping the project moving along - and it certainly helps if the open project is part of their day job. The technology is very much secondary to that. - Jean-Claude Bradley

Right, but it doesn't have to be the same person, continually. Aren't there case studies from software development where projects started with one queen end with another? - Matthew Todd

I also think there are two points being made here, generally. One concerns open projects, where anyone may collaborate on a problem, and these are the most difficult to run, and the most radical. The other type is one where competitors are turned into collaborators by a process of limited openness - i.e. where a large number of potential collaborators are encouraged to share data, but this sharing is not open. This latter type was spectacularly demonstrated by Sean Cutler's recent Science paper. One might argue that these projects simply target those people most likely to be able to, or want to, collaborate. While such projects are not open, they may in the interim demonstrate more forcibly the power of exploding your circle of colleagues. - Matthew Todd

Apache is an example where both (a) the developer of the original code (Robert McCool) left, and (b) it's basically been run by a large group without a single leader ever since. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... summarizes some of this. Steven Weber's book on open source has more about the way the leadership model evolved early on. Apache seems to be pretty unusual, though. The Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life model seems more common in successful open source projects. - Michael Nielsen

Agreed, the Apache model is somewhat unusual and I don't think it would work for a language. That said it's still a core group of people leading the way. - Deepak Singh

some more thoughts on this http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/2009... - Jean-Claude Bradley

broadcasting ideas in competition ocean could lead not only to collaboration, but.... unfortunately. Even inside of big labs or paper or grants peer-review people steal each other ideas all the time. How will you protect your IP? - Alexey

Alexey we choose to work on projects where IP protection is not an objective - Jean-Claude Bradley

Just thought I would mention, Kyle Cassidy, photographer, is organizing a similar collaboration thingy here, given an enormous boost from Neil Gaiman's blog-and-tweet readership: http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/513940... - Heather