In response to my comments about my limited ability to transform the system, Phil wrote "That's the sort of thinking that leads people to get involved in politics." Philip undoubtedly says it like he's saying, "That the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to people getting eaten."
When Alisa switched from being involved in the school as a a parent to being on the school committee, I observed that it was like trading in her fly swatter for a hammer. As a parent, she could directly address a lot of the immediate problems with trying to interact with the neighborhood school our son attends. At the same time, she was frustrated that the origin of many of these problems were the result of systemic problems that she had little power to address. Hammers are great for getting work done, but they're not very useful for swatting flies. And if you try to swat flies with them, you end up breaking stuff.
This morning we looked at a number of big projects that have been done to create collaboratories (or facilitate collaboration within and among the big national laboratories). I had a number of reservations about the approaches they're using. They are focused primarily on supporting high-powered researchers and providing access to lesser mortals to some of the data, services, and instruments that the hi-flyers take for granted.
One particularly striking statement was by Terry Disz who said that, internally, they set artificially big goals for themselves to produce a crisis and use that to catapault their projects big steps forward. By this, I inferred they look for big grants to apply for and invest significant amounts of effort seeking these grants. (And get a good proportion, no doubt). I contrast this with my own approach which is to look at the range of projects I can accomplish directly, with little or no support. If I had a million dollars (I would buy you a house...) No, seriously. If I had a million dollars, I have ideas that could quickly invest that money to produce tangible benefits to faculty, students, and the educational enterprise in my department. (When Randy and I went to Johns Hopkins, the director of the educational technology outfit said you should always be ready with a million dollar idea to tell some potential grantor if they walk in the door). But rather than chasing that million dollars, I can simply build stuff today. Should I be going after million dollar grants? Oh, probably. But I'm happier just building stuff.
I didn't see anything that would encourage collaboration. There were some things that collaborators could use, but nothing that would initiate or increase the likelihood of collaboration. It reminded me of when I was on the Integrative Science Building committee. The goal of the ISB was to bring faculty from biology, chemistry, and biochemistry together to increase the potential for collaboration. We met for hours and each stakeholder group (researchers, educators, technologists, etc) would describe the specifications for the spaces they needed. Late in the process, I brought up the point that no-one had described anything that would faciliate or enable collaboration and asked if anyone had considered how the building might be designed to do that: did anyone have any ideas at all. No-one did. I had one or two. The first was to make the building unhelpful -- by that, I meant that your office would be at point A, but you'd have to go to point B to get a drink of water, and point C to get your mail, and point D to go to the bathroom, and point E to get your lunch. You get the picture. By forcing people to visit different parts of the building, you increased the likelihood of informal contacts and at least passing familiarity with what different groups were doing. The other point is to make sure there's something for people to see when they get there. You need to externalize the work taking place in the labs and get it out where everyone can see it: give people tiny offices with no windows. Don't let people put anything up on the walls inside the labs, create all the comfortable, friendly spaces in public places, so that people have their meetings out in the open, where other people have access to them.
Here is a rough outline of some of the thoughts I'm thinking of exploring in the white paper.
Technology solutions that are small, simple and focused tend to win out over larger more complex systems. (Really?) At the same time, there is a tension within any project between those who want to keep it small and focused and those who want it to have more features -- and more features -- to have it grow until it becomes an unrecognizably bloated behemoth. For the developer, the challenge is to choose which features to include and which to leave out.
Duck is an environment for students to explore practice questions. The developer began with the explicit goal of breaking down the false dichotomy among right and wrong answers. Although many faculty begin with the expectation that they should be able to mark items as "right" or "wrong", the challenge of writing unique feedback for each item provides an opportunity for them to be reflective about the nature of the task at hand. This has been effective in transforming the kinds of questions some faculty write, as they realize the questions they're asking are not very interesting.
The PNL collaboratory found that, although many faculty demanded a system that could give control to faculty over who had control of the screen, in fact such systems were too cumbersome and that simpler, more generic systems like VNC were more effective.
Apropos to the recent discussion of otherkin is 
this article about a boy and his best friend -- a python. Some kids have all the luck.