Let's take the main argument here seriously for a moment: the Wikimedia movement needs a better platform for inclusive, public, multi-language, long-term discussion.  We'll especially need this if we expect the Global Council to succeed and live up to our hopes for participation and transparency.  MediaWiki and our existing community spaces are very good at many things but this isn't quite one of them, yet.

As a person who sees software development happen up close, I fully support the idea that a large wagon full of money could carry us a long way towards these goals, and we already have the right people, skills, and shared values to get us there.  However, we still have two main alternatives: find a software package "off the shelf", or cook one up in-house.  Ideally, we can do exactly what Quim has proposed: start with a system known to work, and benefit from it right now, but at the same time, slowly but deliberately take steps towards integrating the best parts of that system into our own software.

It should be clear that any choice of development process will take *years* and that we can't afford to do nothing while we wait?

I'd like to work with the kitchen metaphor begun above.  We could say that MediaWiki started as a small but effective home for a few people to cook together.  Maybe there was no oven so the types of meals that could be made were somewhat limited.  We found a filing cabinet on the street and a padlock for it, because auditing and curating the recipes was a big concern.  Happily, we didn't try to build our own filling cabinet.  This cabinet sits in the corner of the kitchen along with a desk for two people where we have all our meetings (talk pages).  The desk drawer includes blank paper and several black pencils, so it's a really nice environment for writing new recipes together, as long as you're okay with feeling a little cramped sharing this desk and you don't mind the cooking smells.  And bring your own color pencils if you want to decorate your recipe or get otherwise fancy. Now, the lack of an oven is really starting to become a problem.  By this time we realize that the village likes our food and we'll need to bake a lot of bread, if we bake one loaf.  There's already a communal oven down the road but we decide to build a beautiful brick oven in the neighbor's back yard, like one we've seen in a book.  Great, but we've never done this before and we don't have any insulation or mortar.  The first three attempts sort of collapse and even once we get it right ten years later, by that time we already need a much bigger oven and—now we realize that we need a meeting space for one hundred people.  We have the money to knock down walls and build a meeting room, but we've also never done this before, there will need to be extra bathrooms, wheelchair access, ventilation, break-out space, good connections to public transportation...  Meanwhile, do we hold meetings in the perfectly functional city college campus that happens to be a few blocks away (ie., is also an open-source project), or do we insist that everything must happen in our building, so we continue with ten people barely fitting into the sweaty kitchen and having nightly arguments about what color to paint the theoretical meeting room?

Regards,