Haven't read the author's book, but the ideas sound very much like Christopher Alexander's work in systemizing collaborative design. If you're not familiar, i

Haven't read the author's book, but the ideas sound very much like Christopher Alexander's work in systemizing collaborative design. If you're not familiar, i highly recommend these: http://www.google.com/books?id=Kh3T3XFUfPQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Notes+on+the+Synthesis+of+Form&ei=NINDSLj8Cp2yjAHgtLT9DQ&sig=sB9x2Q6GU0i01mDROwdRIn5ht9U http://www.google.com/books?id=Kh3T3XFUfPQC&printsec=fro... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Experiment and finally: http://web.archive.org/web/20070528030431/http://www.rainmagazine.com/architecture/oregonexperiment.html http://web.archive.org/web/20070528030431/http://www.rainmag... basically, alexander pointed out back in the 60s/70s that the simplest design problems, when approached from a conscious design perspective & properly considered, spiral out to millions of small relationships that are well beyond any one human's grasp. and so he formulates a system for organizing the people involved with the project & defining a hierarchy that enables the big problems to be settled before the small problems & for individual domain specific/'problem owners' to be established at the right place within overall the process. that said, for all the beauty in his theories, in practice (in architecture at least) political issues often affect the design process far more significantly than he anticipated - which is why this article is interesting, as it addresses the political value of this approach first. +1 for social hacking.