Re:Cargo cult science? (Score 4, Interesting)

This is *really* interesting. It gets to the "philosophy" of research as opposed to this study itself - we talk about this internally all the time and about how we can build an industry infrastructure to support this Feynman-esque research. Here's what I'd love to do: get a group of industry folks together on all sides of the fence (so there's no question of funding); agree to some ground rules, a methodology, and then also agree that the work will be published no matter what. To some degree that's what some of the consumer review groups do but I don't think we have a *real* equivalent in the IT world for the really big stuff. This gets down to the question of how could we set up something truly unbiased (perceived or real) in the Feynman sense of the word that would also work as an economic model. It seems like a consortium of consumers (organizations that use technology as opposed to selling it commercially) who do not have a vested interest in the outcome would be ideal. It would be great to get some responses to this thread with some suggestions. Again, the premise is simple, and funding from a fairly neutral third party like the government is one thing, but how would the IT community do something where multiple participants in the user world would be willing to fund it or multiple vendors, as a group, will be willingly to take that risk?