Toby-
I was saying earlier that it'd be nice to have the thing around, even before it really gets the software features that it needs. But I agree that it would be rather anticlimactic to advertise it, just to have people discover that it really isn't that neat (yet). Erik, your stories of disaster awaiting us make more sense now.
So perhaps the solution is to launch it ''without'' great fanfare???
Well, this doesn't address my technical concerns - makes single sign-on more difficult to add when an account database already exists, existing images will have to be duplicated again - and I fear that in terms of policy, it would make things even worse when only a small group of people sets the initial project policies.
Patience. This week we will formulate the Commons roadmap together. Maybe we can move up the creation of a wiki to a point when not all but only the most essential features exist; perhaps not a fully working version of single sign-on yet and just very basic image sharing. If the final version is ready in 3 months, maybe we can get a beta version up and running in 2 or 3 weeks. How does that sound?
Regards,
Erik