Someone needs to tell google to give these people google wave invites! The geniuses shows the drones how to get things done.
New projects now under way will help to explore how collaborative mathematics works best (see http://go.nature.com/4ZfIdc). One question of particular interest is whether the process can be scaled up to involve more contributors. Although DHJ Polymath was large compared with most mathematical collaborations, it fell short of being the mass collaboration initially envisaged. Those involved agreed that scaling up much further would require changes to the process. A significant barrier to entry was the linear narrative style of the blog. This made it difficult for late entrants to identify problems to which their talents could be applied. There was also a natural fear that they might have missed an earlier discussion and that any contribution they made would be redundant. In open-source software development, this difficulty is addressed in part by using issue-tracking software to organize development around ‘issues’ — typically, bug reports or feature requests — giving late entrants a natural starting point, limiting the background material that must be mastered, and breaking the discussion down into modules. Similar ideas may be useful in future Polymath Projects.
via Massively collaborative mathematics : Article : Nature.