your proposal is a good one and I encourage you to focus on
a) the EDC (collabroating with Hal) –> a excellent project idea would be to analyze and extend the Project-Builder
b) for the IR you should/could focus on ideas about meta-design and consequences for:
1. how it leads to new divisions of labor
2. Wikipedia - how is trust established in such envrionments? what motivates people to particpate? special challenge: you could try to contribute something to Wikipedia
3. open source
4. social capital