Don,
I would like to take a crack at your concerns from MIT-Sloan perspective. First, please understand that this is our first venture into the opensource community and it's a learning experience. Opensource is a weird admixture of anarchy and tyranny.
Second, both OpenForce and we are trying to strike a balance between coming up with code, on the one hand, that will be benefit the community and, on the other hand, will meet Sloan's needs. An important reason why the project has been delayed is that OpenForce is trying to do it's best cleaning up a lot of crud code in ACES and trying to make the application less Sloan-specific. At the same time, we have been putting a lot of pressure on Ben and OF to make sure that Sloan's needs and timetable are met. While in the best of all possible worlds everything would be transparent to everyone, in this the actual world we don't have the luxury of maintaining n conversations.
Third, we began collaborating with Berklee because they are just across the river and recently committed to dotLRN. They also have a "real deadline" to meet. As Samuel Johnson said, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." At the meeting we concluded that it would be a good idea to let the community know where we are and also what further work we envision. Our intention is to establish a mechanism for RFCs and that was the spirit of Caroline's posting. But please recognize that we also have deadlines to meet and may not be able to keep the process as transparent as we would like.
Let me conclude by saying that the intention here is not to keep the development closed and inaccessible. We are all just in a mad dash to meet the needs of our clients. Our first priority is to the folks who the write the checks...
