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As biodiversity information systems grow in size and complexity, truly distributed open-source development becomes an increasingly attractive option. However, coordinating a number of development teams coming from different backgrounds and having different skill sets and favorite software tools is quite challenging. We describe the history of the DINA consortium, an organization aiming to build a professional web-based collection management system through distributed open-source development. We analyze the sucess and failure of various collaboration approaches tried by the consortium and the participating institutions in the past, and describe the current model, which has evolved from these experiences.