Putting it altogether...

The website has now been pulled from Google Apps so I can integrate the bits I have been planning to do since the beginning. When the website was hosted at Google I found there were limitations as to how it could be structured and linking it altogether would be a nightmare. Google Apps however is a great place to host your site if you starting off a new website, I found it easy to update and simple to manage, but if you wish to do something outside of that structure it becomes a little tedious. When everything is sitting on the same server at Dreamhost now I can tailor the chosen Open Source applications to work together, though I think there lies a challenge in itself, but at least I can get into the code and put in the bits of glue to make it work.
As the idea relies heavily on collaboration I thought that having a social web running here will help in identifying who is who and what their own opinions were, so Elgg is running on a subdomain at the moment waiting to be pulled in. For discussion and information I chose phpBB3 and MediaWiki respectively, both very able applications that do their tasks very well and have a big following. Another favourite of mine is waiting too, dotProject, for handling tasks and planning out future efforts on the site.
At this very moment however the main site is transferring over and is empty on the server here. The easiest thing to do would be to put up the same pages that existed on the Google Apps so I might just do that just to get some content there. Then I can try to make the whole set of applications come together seamlessly (as possible) into one site whilst putting the message across about what the site is all about.
The benefit of it all sitting in the same place on one set of databases means that any duplication of information and process can be removed. What this will mean with using completely different sets of Open Source applications is not clear to me right now but I have in the back of my mind some hybrid of them open to anyone who wishes to take part using a CVS system.
It is quite a daunting task ahead and I do not really know everything I need to complete it, even whether the effort will be worth it. I guess only one thing I can do now I have started - just get on with it...