In general, from the point of view of the “project leader(s)” (i.e., you and Venrock) the obvious attractiveness of an open source approach is the potential for getting various sorts of help from others outside the immediate organization. That potential depends on how big the pool of potential contributors is, how low the barriers to entry are for participation, how amenable the tasks are to being addressed by casual contributors, and what their motivation is.

In your case the pool of potential contributors would be relatively large (basically anyone with a serious interest in the types of businesses you’d be funding), but you’d also be competing for their attention with their own jobs and other things they’d be involved in. On the barriers to participation front, you might have issues with having to get people under NDA for certain things, which lowers the ability of someone to do “drive by” contributions (e.g., reading about a potential deal somewhere, downloading your material about it, and making a useful comment or other contribution).

On the nature of contributions, the question would be what sort of things people could usefully do. I’d be reasonably optimistic about that, especially if a good part of what you’re looking for is information you hadn’t previously been aware of, reasonably informed opinions and perhaps some promotion of what you’re doing.

Finally, in terms of motivations, I’m not sure that people would necessarily be looking for a direct monetary payoff — and in fact leading people to expect a payoff might be counterproductive. (Open source projects make it clear up front that people are volunteers, and can’t expect any return except for getting the software itself to use, modify, redistribute, etc.) I suspect people would rather be looking for an opportunity to do something interesting, show off their knowledge, build a reputation, and perhaps parlay that reputation into future employment opportunities. And beyond that, I think a lot of people would be interested in helping to create products and services that they themselves would like to see — which is very similar to the base motivation for people who contribute to open source software.

So the net-net for me is that this is an interesting idea worth your exploring, with the major issue being the sensitivity of the dea-related information you’d be making available, and how that would affect the ability of the right people (from your point of view) to participate.

1) companies that you have passed on, and where you had issue; if they’re not right for you, maybe they’re right for someone else? maybe you’d love to go in with them on a series B but they’re too early stage right now; kind of tough to do if they don’t get a series A, so why not share? (i know this happens a little)

2) models for putting valuations on companies; i don’t need to know names, but i’d love to see what axiomatically, for venrock or xyz other fund, drives value for a video gaming company let’s say? and how this differs fund by fund?

3) i love the whole using collective networks to distribute/promote idea; don’t know how it could be done optimally, but that just sounds so awesome

there’s a ton of other things I could imagine on my hypothetical wishlist for an idea like this; something like this would def be pretty amazing

Vencorps is doing something along these lines already.