The social news site Digg is a hub of information. Links are shared, votes are cast and in theory the best information rises to the top.

The magic behind the site is not the algorithm that determines when stories are promoted to the front page, it’s the people who are constantly scouring the Web, submitting stories and providing the intellectual power that keeps the site running.

Digg has a community of more than 600,000 registered users. They’ve gone far beyond the tipping point of creating a social networking site and some would argue they are spilling over with collective knowledge. And that’s why DuggSpace has been formed.

After hearing the viral rumor that Kevin Rose started Digg for $200, Roddy Richards, a software developer in Chicago, began to wonder how much it would cost to develop a new social networking site through collaborative methods that draw on the best practices of Digg itself.

The final project, which Richards says probably won’t be called Duggspace for legal reasons, won’t be a Digg-clone. It will be a true social networking site like MySpace of Facebook -– but it will be created by volunteer users of the Digg community who will create the Web application through purely Democratic means.

“The final name will be put to a vote, possibly with the help of a Digg article. I would like to leave as much of this as possible up to the masses and provide as much of the best practice functionality of other social networks as possible, expanding on it where possible. I think it’s important to stress that the vision for this is purely democratic and collaborative…decisions will be directed by those involved, and the pros and cons of each approach will be evaluated.”

It is a collaboratively developed Web application but the process of building will use Digg-like moderation to develop features, make business decisions etc.

There is even talk about releasing the code under GPL, giving others the tools to build their own social networks – but that decision will be left to the DuggSpace community.

Richards proposes an interesting experiment for Digg.com users. Many of them have the talents to build the back-end of social networking sites, but can they do it collaboratively using a method that they have become accustomed to on Digg, which is only used to find and highlight top news stories?

More interesting to me is that Richards has made an open call to the Digg community to begin this process. Social networks like Digg are now a resource in themselves. If you want to grab the attention of Web developers, Digg is a good place to make an open call. If you want to survey teenagers on the coolest movies of 2006 – better try a different social network. But all these networks are open and ready to be tapped. People are naturally organizing themselves into groups that share a niche intelligence.

The idea for Richard’s project is only a weekend old, and already he says he has been swarmed with e-mails (over 300). In the next 24 hours he intends to set up a blog that will allow Diggers to vote and comment on the questions that will be best answered by a group.

Really this is a question about whether the Digg community is ready to evolve beyond voting for news and, in this case, become active in contributing their collective wisdom to the development of a real life Web application.

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David Cohn is the editor of NewAssignment.Net’s blog