I considered a project loosely along those lines. My idea was a One-Meg-of-Data project. Define a megabyte of data that everyone would have have in a bit-identical form.

The appeal of this to me would be in the code golf style of approach of specifying the actual data. Apart from plain useful raw data, It would include a bare minimum VM that can be used to generate larger outputs from the data. More complex VMs would be permitted provided a reference implementation can be run on the Minimal VM. The code for the reference Implementation would, of course, be included in the one megabyte.

A program using the data could request

* raw bytes

* output from the VM given code and parameters (with perhaps a cycle limit to stop endless loop hangs)

* output from the VM given code and parameters specified at an index in the data.

* output from the VM given code and parameters specified at an index in the data plus user parameters.

The system would be stateless, the VM would only exist for the duration of the data generation call. The same parameters would always produce the same output.

I have doubts as to it's fundamental usefulness but it would certainly make a fun collaborative project at the very least.