I hereby kick off the AudioMan Project. I wrote some tentative ideas down and I'm looking for feedback. Here's an excerpt from the page:

AudioMan is a digital music organizer for personal computers. The purpose of the AudioMan Project is not only to create a useful product but also to explore software engineering practices and tools and to collaborate on a group project without severe pressure from market forces. The processes and code of the AudioMan Project will be completely transparent and free for the general public to read and discuss. This transparency will also allow members to second-source others.

In that sense, this project will be artifact-heavy. If you don't like writing about what you are doing this project is probably not for you. One of the primary goals is to stimulate discussion of software engineering topics.

The project will start with the code that Karen, Peter, Trevor, Jim and I produced during our year-long fourth year school project.

Update 8:18 AM: I guess I should give more details. :) Yes, it's open source -- at the end of the school project (this month) we decided to release the AudioMan source code. We have not decided on a license yet.

I wouldn't call it an experiment since we are writing a (hopefully) useful product. I would say it's a typical open source project but done by software engineers. So in terms of organization it is more like the Eclipse project than the Linux kernel project. Rather than use the BIFI (build-it, fix-it) approach that is common in open source projects we will use a more organized process. Sure, this may slow us down a little in the short term but I am confident that long term gains will be realised.

Collaboration will probably be mostly online but given that most of the prospective members are from the Ottawa area I'm sure we can have face-to-face meetings over beers every once in a while. You don't have to be in Ottawa to join the project though.