A very astute reader at Paul Caron's TaxProf blog asked about how we will update the casebook chapters we publish in the eLangdell Ecasebook Stimulus Project. I have reproduced my reply here for everyone's benefit as I believe this will be a common question.
First of all, all of the chapters that we commission and publish will be provided in multiple formats including RTF, HTML and PDF. This means that faculty can update the material themselves. We would hope that they would then re-contribute these updated chapters back to the Legal Education Commons (legaleducationcommons.org).
If enough of a community develops around a collection of chapters, I am hoping that a individual or small group will self-identify as willing to keep the materials up to date for the benefit of the rest of the community. We (CALI) will develop mechanisms on the website to recognize and laud these folks. I can envision approaching existing communities like AALS sections or groups of faculty who all teach the same topic at one law school to step to do this. In some cases, I can imagine CALI providing bounties to update materials. Pure crowdsourcing needs someone to apply energy and organizational effort to keep the process working – that's CALIs role.
I can also imagine enterprising young faculty, fresh out of tenure and particulary savvy to open access ideals, wanting to associate their name with a popular commons ecasebook. By providing more and better updates than anyone else, they would establish a name for themselves among other academics.
Some or all of these ideas could work – we will have to see how it goes. The key, from my perspective, is to provide sufficient scaffolding and make the work sufficiently small so that it is easy and convenient for busy law faculty to participate.