11:46pm: The Institute launched today and the reaction was unexpectedly great. A fair amount of positive comments, links, and new members. The skeptics, rather than simply bashing, asked smart, pointed questions, the same questions we’ve been asking ourselves for the past several months. We have good reasons for starting the venture, we have a vision and ways to make it work. We have a structure to lend stability and incentives to attract resources. As a place-less organization we can be nimble and distributed. As an organization without employees there’s less power-hoarding and ego-stroking. We’re all a little idealist and yet practical enough to make it work.

But to the question ‘What are you going to do?‘ we don’t have any hard answers. And that’s part of the beauty. With only a skeleton of top-down oversight we allow lots of ideas to spring up from the bottom and possibly flower. More sustainable than pure volunteer efforts, less stifling than previous notions of what this kind of group could be. I myself am still learning to step back, yield control, and let the experiments run, while still offering guidance or assistance.