Thanks everyone for the helpful comments and encouragement!
I very much like the staged implementation model whereby volunteers may contribute easily in the course of their other business and in bite-sized, manageable pieces. From there the problem is one of coordination. I'll check out the standards for documentation and release criteria, thanks Jade! What else might developers need to know?
Thanks, Paul, for the reference to the Zeldman and Meyer books. Of the two, I prefer the Meyer book (http://www.ericmeyeroncss.com/) because it is a detailed, no-nononse tutorial that shows you how to apply the principles Zeldman advances. The first chapter offers strategies and procedures for the redesign of existing pages, and so speaks directly to my fiddling with the current .lrn site. The second chapter shows you how to build pages from scratch, and so speaks to others. I find it wonderfully accessible, quite precise, and instructive. But maybe others have their favorites to recommend, and how might we build a rough consensus on our direction?
I suspect I'll want to start collating these things somewhere, maybe on the new .lrn site. But as we've just started I am sure there are many more things that ought to be considered. Has anyone started to do this with .lrn/openacs, do we have a working model of code redesign already?
Thanks!
