Colin on the Structure of the Project

that's a great help - thanks very much bill - and david, and john and wendy - this is precisely the sort of feedback that we need, and a small indication of what the group could achieve through a combination of architected loose (and occasionally less loose) collaboration.

in terms of staffing and pulling this off, i think a significant quantity of the work will be accomplished separately - informing one another, seeking comment and so forth, but generating it independently - hopefully largely self-organizing, with a push here or there. any syntheses or cross cutting pieces are certainly more complicated, but also have a potentially big upside. as bill notes, i don't see irreconcilable differences by any stretch, and where they arise, we'll just have to deal with them through compromise - acknowledging assumptions, differences of approach, etc. ultimately, if we can't get past our differences, it does not say much for our academic or community credentials - and would be a pity in far more ways than whatever written product it tainted. which is to say, knowing what we know now, we can and should do this.