The most obvious way for a programmer to pitch to their projects is to use a committee of experts, like YC does. I'm sure we could come up with other methods t

The most obvious way for a programmer to pitch to their projects is to use a committee of experts, like YC does. I'm sure we could come up with other methods too; maybe some sort of web-based voting scheme, for instance. Government contracts are nice for solving certain problems, where you have a narrow goal to achieve, but don't address other problems, such as those that call for a more general, trial-and-error, research type approach. For example, say you wanted to work on Emacs, or the Leo editor. I doubt you could get a government contract to do that under the current system, despite the fact that your work has the potential to benefit all the programmers who use those programs. You may be right about academia being the best way to go. I myself dropped out of college after two years. It felt like a big waste of time to me. You have to do a lot of irrelevant work and it's expensive as hell. The prospect of enduring another two years of that, followed by a Masters program and then a PhD just makes me cringe. I don't see any reason why we can't create an organization with minimal bureaucracy that allows hackers to do their thing.