Some words to this post first: Don't see this post a pessimistic critical speech, putting the idea away by default. This shall be constructive, if you really plan to bring such a project through.

The problems I see with community projects:

1: I'm sure everyone spontanously likes the vision of making something really big together. But such a project needs to be coordinated and for this you need a platform and an instrument. Yes a forum like this is a platform and A7 might be an instrument, but in the core not for such a project. To spread ideas, to exchange and discuss details, to divide tasks, to share the material, to see the progress, there has to be a better form of communication. A new forum, a new chat, a new system of sharing data, and all would be seperated from this forum. Another Gs forum... And I doubt that even that would succeed. What would succeed? An all in one software. A software that is tool and platform together. You log in and you are at the site. You can see what everyone does and works out and coment it at once. Sounds nice. But obvisously neither A7 nor this forum nor a combination of both is such a tool. You'd have to build up the tool before you can actuylly start. And for the tool,... well that could be another community project couldn't it

2: This is a development platform of all genres. I think when you speak of a community project you mean a project with 20,40,60, may be even 100 people working together, the dream is of course even higher. But how to find 40,60,100 people that want to work on the same project the sme genre the same topic? If this woulb be a forum for development of fantasy rpgs that deal with dragons and magic and dungeons, then ... may be. But here. You'd need a really attractive setting. An Idea. The idea! But nearly everything has be done in computergames. There are no big ideas left (except some brillant casual game concepts may be). If it's not the idea that makes your project attractive, what else? Grafics, gameplay, systems, atmosphere, story. Yes you'd need a community project for creating the contents to attract a real great amount of people to join.

3: Who would lead the project. Because lostclimate is right, there has to be someone, who is the boss, who divides work, who collects ideas, who represents the will of the other ones, who coordinates, who has the overview, who points out a direction... The list of tasks that should be done by one person or at least a small amount of people, that have very good possibilities of communication is very long. Seriously: Is there anyone, who would say: Yes, apparently from my normal life, my normal job, my normal family a can effort the task of that dimensions?


Of course this is overdrawn. I used this style to make the points clear I wnated to state. A project can start smaller, you can give it realistic dimensions and things will be easier. But the core of these problems will stay, when you want to do something that really claims the name "community project". If anyone has a concept and at least claims to have solutions (good convincing solutions ) for the points mentioned here, I will join in

Edit: @pappenheimer: Yes "schutzkontakt" is a good example. The project doesn't show of a brand new idea, but some grafics and a progress, that shows that it is build up in a realistic way, in the right dimensions. And in fact it could be a possibility that such projects grow and grow and attract more and more people, and then something serious could work out of it. But in the past years, there have been several comparable attempts on the projects or jobs offered forum and none of them turned into something big.