[PD] [ot] managing distributed development

[Thomas Grill]

Hi all,
while i'm in Boston i just had dinner with a well known researcher in
fields of user/distributed innovation and communities.
One of the topics of conversation was whether it would be possible to
design management systems for distributed development (like sourceforge)
in a way that _all_ management tasks are taken away from the
responsibility of individual persons but rather handled in a
quasi-automatic (community-governed by polls etc.) manner.
>From my experience with open source development i was very sceptic but
haven't yet really come up with a _principal_ reason why this would be
impossible. My arguments have been more on the side of actual feasibility
because of the development costs of such a management tool to deal with
every conceivable subtlety and dependency in the process of development
and packaging.
>From a theoretical viewpoint it would though be interesting if there are
more principal reasons why this could be impossible.
Is the fact that the development of the tool can never come to an end such
a principal reason?
Any other thoughts?

thanks and all the best, gr~~~