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Wow, lots of great ideas coming in on this. I wonder if fleshing out a test case would be useful for the class of materials that might have trouble finding a home in standard publications. For example, Roy's MODS<->MPEG DIDL shootout. Let's say that Roy put a digitized book on the code4lib server (maybe one of his own :-), and enough descriptive metadata to kick things off. Roy then challenges the world to do something impressive with the results, maybe directly contacting some MODS and DIDL folks. Those of you who have ever seen Sun's blueprints know that this is sort of the intent behind their blueprint series, define what seems to be a agreed-upon problem and let the "best of breed" solutions emerge. So far, any of this could happen in either the lead-up to a traditional article (groundwork for "a comparison of MODS and MPEG DIDL") or this kind of task could be described and offered out on any blog. Now a group like the folks working on Evergreen do a heck of a lot with MODS and maybe they decide to take up the banner for it. This leads to the first of a couple of TPMDPs (Traditional Publishing Model Departure Point): TPMDP #1: Some sort of step by step capturing mechanism kicks in for recording how the Evergreen folks approach the task and start to build a solution. Maybe something as low barrier as a link to their development blog. This needs to be unobtrusive but is an important layer. It always looks like divine design after a solution is presented, and Roy's right that no one ever wants to talk about the wrong turns they make in the path to a solution, but these are often the most instructive parts. TPMDP #2: A level of comments is made available for each step of the process. Peter's noted that comments are really hard to do well, and it would be great if this could be done in some sort of threaded RSS model. Jon Udell once wrote about a researcher trying to model network events as chirping sounds so that someone monitoring hundreds of systems would instantly notice when something was astray, and be able to instantly grasp which system it was by the chirp that had changed. So maybe we need a comment chirp plugin or something, but the smart money is still on an RSS comments feed for now. Still, it would be nice to see if comments could be layered in more elegantly than they usually are. TPMDP #3: An IRC bridge is made available. I once wrote a hook for IRC to snag insults from a supybot in cocoon so that a dynamic bit of content could appear in an S5 slide. I didn't realize until afterwards that supybots often have incredibly foul mouths and didn't do much with the results, but I am convinced there is something in the conversational model in IRC that could do a lot in other spaces. The koha folks do town halls with IRC, what if an article, or story posting, or whatever this thing is, shows who is online in code4lib and has some sort of entry point into the channel with a nick like "reader_wants_to_talk_about_shootout" or something similar? Or maybe the posting itself is some sort of bot that can be asked to record parts of discussion? Maybe there could be some sort of scheduling mechanism, so that someone could say "discuss this solution with the creators at 10 am on Tuesday" and a log of the discussion could be kept with the posting. Panizzi, Ed Summers' bot, could probably be convinced to do something like this. TPMDP #4: Some sort of presentation tools are always an option. Most projects have a point where you want to get some feedback before you proceed further or you suspect a quick reality check might save you grief later on. Again, this would have to be extremely low barrier, but it would be invaluable in understanding the information flow and final direction within a project. TPMDP #5: A spin-off "traditional" publication would still be possible downstream. A lot of people only want to find out more about the innards of a project after seeing its final results, so nothing precludes a more neatly packaged version at some point in the process and, in fact, this is where a lot of this would lead. But they key to me is that the messy "bits" would also be available if there was interest. art