Some of you may know the Blender Open Projects, or at least some of their results like Big Buck Bunney.
Goals of this projects were to create examples/demos of whats possible with Blender, and on the other side help to improve the working with Blender.

I want this for Magento, too.
I want build a demo Store which implements a real world scenario,.. completely as open source, so everyone can use it as example.

Magento still has a bad reputation if it comes to strong customizations, mostly because inexperienced developers fail to implement the requirements in a correct way.
This project will show, how to effectively and in the right way integrate special requirements into a magento store.

Also it will create leading examples for common modifications like replacement of flat tables, search and other performance related stuff.

Another side effect will be the pushing of limits of the framework behind magento and see, where it needs improvements.
And not only the framework, also the whole tool ecosystem around it.

What are my personal Intentions here? I was a few weeks part of a big project with very special and interesting requirements.
Lets say the Project failed very hard. Since then I always thought about the requirements they had. And how to solve them the best way, if you are not restricted to the fastest solution.

And I think this totally deserves to get done public, as the result would be this far away from a standard magento shop, that its simply amazing. It would show what an awesome result you can get, if you hire magento developers, who know what they do.

And during the work on it, its a perfect playground for beginners to work with very experienced developers and to grow with the project.

If you have questions or want to show your interest: contact me per twitter, G+, mail or look out on the magento irc channels. Current plan is to initiate the project around christmas. Project duration is 1 year. More detailed roadmap with the targeted specifications will get published in january depending on the developers who are interested.