Well, as usual, Art rocks on his list, but I have to point out a few
of my favorites with some comments.

On Feb 21, 2006, at 8:29 PM, Art Rhyno wrote:

> "Our project was a complete disaster, and this is exactly what we did
> wrong"

This is _so_ needed. Almost every article I see buries the mistakes
and tries to show how well things went. We need to come clean. Half
the time we fail, or don't deliver what we thought we were
delivering. Let's be honest and we can all learn from it. Reference
my Access 2005 talk if you must.

> "Framework shootout: a user comments system in 10 frameworks, from 10
> contributors, with comments available in each solution"

Here I have to interject my MODS<->MPEG DIDL shootout idea for the
code4lib conference, which didn't make it, but I still believe we
need. Call it whatever you want, but I want to see us give two teams
a digitized book -- two or more packages of descriptive metadata
(e.g., MARC, ONIX), page image files, and OCR'd text, and have them
report back on what they did, how, and what they can now do with the
result. For my money, that would alone be worth doing a code4lib
journal/magazine/whatever. It doesn't have to be a winner take all
kind of thing, but something that illustrates the trade-offs.

> "Federated searching benchmarks: 5 targets, 5 solutions, 1 common
> environment"

This is _so_ needed. God, I wish I had the wherewithal to pull it off.

> "Talking to your admin people about dspace"

I would amend this, to "Talking to _anyone_ about dspace", and how to
be successful in so doing

> "How to whiteboard effectively and convince others you don't need
> therapy"

Or, how to prototype with a decent indexer, a scripting language, and
duct tape.

It's time for us to roll up our sleeves, kick tail, and take names.
I'm not sure exactly what roll I can or should take, but the more I
think about this project the better I like it.
Roy