Greg Costikyan of Manifesto Games just said the following on his blog.
If I had the necessary funding at this point, it’s straight forward: I’d go looking for a good database guy, a couple of good PHP programmers comfortable with Linux, and so on.
I was really hoping to volunteer for this project but since I just read the above (which indicates Greg’s greatest priority as finding backend people), I wouldn’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole. I’m not even going to comment on why this gives me a bad feeling because if you’ve done professional web development work, you’ll know why already. Sorry been there, done that. All the best to him though on his endeavor.