I am relative newcomer to the community and geographically on the other side of planet ( looking from New England that is :) ) - Here is a perspective from distance -
1. There has been lengthy discussions in OpenACS community about evangelism or marketing effort. I think a consortium with all the benefits mentioned on other posts, is better positioned to manage this front. Because of MIT 's worldwide reputation , their endorsement can be most helpful.
2. Most of dotLRN architecture/code is not specific to educational sphere. Already there has been discussion on modifying that code base to function as dotWRK. If we have different verticals lke dotWRK or dotMIL ( for Military !) still most of the core architecture will remain same. Collobrative computing core can not very much between different group. From this point of view, there is little for a dotXYZ consortium to manage on technical management front, only coordination with core architecture. So the technical management issue really concerns to OpenACS.
