First, maybe I'm missing something here, but how would this differ in
principle from the work done by e.g. Donald Skupsky at Information
Requirements Clearinghouse, Zasio, etc.? Steve is of course correct that it
cannot take into account business-specific processes and requirements, but
it didn't appear to be to claim to do that; indeed, its stated goal is "Post
your contribution and help build the best source on records retention
guidelines." I don't think it's particularly useful in its current form, but
with some work I could see it becoming an excellent resource to use as a
starting point. Larry's point about not using it OOTB (out of the box) is
correct as well - to a point.

What about the organization that decides, not through laziness, not through
incompetence, but after careful consideration, that their business
requirements neatly match with stated federal, state, and local regulatory
requirements? There's no requirement that there be a business need longer
than a stated statutory requirement....and many governmental agencies do
that *by definition*, correct? So put one of the RMs on the stand whose
schedule is e.g. the Colorado Model Municipal Records Retention Schedule
(http://www.colorado.gov/dpa/doit/archives/rm/MunicipalRMM/preface.htm). Not
to put words into any of their mouths, but I'm pretty sure they'll be fine. 

Finally, I think Steve's assertion that something developed collaboratively
(public collaboration) == "comic book" quality is simply spurious. After
all, isn't that how just about every one of the ARMA standards is developed?
Now, ARMA isn't using a wiki to do this...but a number of other
ANSI-accredited standards organizations are. How many people would go out to
this narrowly focused resource simply to trash it - for example, to change
all the retention dates to "30 days"? And if they did, wouldn't the
community a) change them back using reversion and b) act to ban such a
troll? Wikipedia does this today; the difference between this and Wikipedia
is that the latter has 1.8 million articles and millions of contributors;
this one would have perhaps thousands of citations and thousands of
contributors. 

Again, structurally I would do it differently than this organization is, but
there isn't anything INHERENTLY bad about the use of wikis or other public
collaboration tools - or should we get rid of things like forums and
listservs, too, because there's no guarantee that anyone posting knows
anything or that they aren't using pseudonyms? And yet quite regularly I'm
sure many of you take something from this list back to your organization
because you found it useful. 

On a very much related note, I strongly urge everyone on this list to read:
Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger
Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, my review of which will be in
the next IMJ
Na*ed Conversations, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

All of these address the notion that collaboration is inherently unreliable
or suspect. 

My .02 while I sift through the email survey responses, 

Jesse Wilkins
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