As there seem to be a number of people interested in doing a web-based
database of generic descriptions, I'd like to make the following
observations based on my experience with collaborative projects in
conventional malacolgical publishing :

- Like it or not, a project of this scale will need a certain amount of
bureaucracy. In particular, an appointed or elected project director will
be essential. This must be one person; even using a small committee of two
or three will foul things up totally, as inevitably one or another of them
will not be able to immediately participate in decision-making (even more
likely to be a regular problem if they live in different time zones or have
jobs), and pivotal decisions will take too long. The project director alone
will have the power to delegate responsibility for the individual families
to the participants.

- Certain decisions must be made before the first contribution is
solicited, and these are of such a basic nature that they cannot be changed
once the project is under way - even if it takes 20 years. These will be :
(1) the scope of the project :
- all mollusca? Recent and fossil (what's a fossil - answers may be
different for Florida residents) or just Recent? Just marine? Just
shell-bearing?
- all genera or only those originally proposed with a description?
- all genera or only those originally proposed as full genera (a
meaningless distinction, really, as a genus is a subgenus if you treat it
as such, and vice versa, but it would make a big difference to the number
of taxa treated)?
(2) the forum and software standards :
- all participants will have to contribute in the same format, but someone
(a Webmaster) will have to provide web space and do the formatting and
updating, as well as backing up the data;
- it will have to be decided at the outset whether end users will be
charged for access, thereby allowing the costs to be offset, or allowed
free access; in the latter case, the project will make a financial loss and
therefore take far longer (most people under 65 prioritise paying work over
voluntary, for some reason). If the database is compiled under the auspices
of, say, the COA, then perhaps a levy could be imposed on members (as part
of their membership fee), who would then be issued passwords or other
access codes. These could be changed automatically with each year's
subscription renewal to limit the scope of fraud via members passing on
their codes to non-members.
(3) delegating
- there will be no shortage of contributors eager to provide the data for
the 'collectible' families, but unless some of them can be persuaded to
yield to someone else and turn themselves to a more obscure family for the
sake of the project as a whole, then the resulting database will still be
too heavily biased towards Neogastropods and Cowries. Nevertheless, the
project director will need extraordinary personal charm or the option of
financial inducement if, for example, the Fossaridae, Assimineidae or
Pyramidellidae are to make it onto the site.

To summarise : the management structure needs to be simple (read :
autocratic) if this is to be even partly completed within our lifetimes;
people may have to do some work other than that which they'd most like to,
and may not get any compensation.