It's hard to keep up at the moment, so here's a brief summary of my impressions from the recent flurry of posts and comments, first some general thoughts, then I'll summarise a couple of recent posts:
The issues that might be helped by the sort of process I outlined include:
- labour - many projects currently struggle because they lack sufficient volunteer scholar time (a central [= prioritised by a team ≈ peer-reviewed] register might help this)
- funding - as AKMA argues (though Mark has reservations) currently some projects languish through difficulties attracting funding (collegial support from a group of scholars might assist through identifying priorities, and also through generating more volunteer time so showing possibility of success, see above)
- promotion - in theory megasites like NT Gateway and its Hebrew Bible imitators (what's a better word for others who follow and to some extent copy a good pioneer?) iTanakh and OT Gateway may serve this function (personally I think they do not yet have the reach among the less IT literate teachers to really do all that's needed...)
- and just plain sharing together and learning from each other...
Wayne Leman has a plea for open collaboration on Bible Translation.
[to Del.icio.us]
Tim, thanks for (non-exclusively) invigorating this discussion. I'm very interested in these discussions and interested in seeing how they unfold. Right now, iTanakh is a one-person, strictly volunteer project, but one step toward an "Open Digital Commons" or whatever you want to call it would be to do more work indexing what is currently available. I wonder how much interest and commitment could be generated for a distributed-responsibility meta-site. Imagine, for example, that Professor X (no, not Patrick Stewart) were responsible for the iTanakh resources related to Genesis, Professor Y for Exodus, etc. This would allow greater expertise to inform the selections listed, and each "page editor" could actually annotate the entries a bit more. Well, I am just thinking out loud. More later.
By 
Christopher Heard, at
August 7, 2005 3:47 PM
Something to describe the process...
schola liberalis?
Na, perhaps "Open Scholarship"? I like the sound of the latter.
