The White House has made an intriguing pick with nominating David Kappos to head up the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Kappos is well-known in the patent world as both a patent reformer in general and, from his position inside IBM, one of the driving forces behind Peer-to-Patent project in particular. Peer -to-Patent is the attempt to apply principles of collaboration and community review to solving USPTO's resource allocation problem. There are too many patents applications awaiting review, and many of them are enormously complicated. There are too few patent examiners and they, through no real fault of their own, don't have access to the knowledge necessary to make sense of the applications in the time they have available to do so. It's kind of a hot mess. That's where Peer-to-Patent comes in...