The ID project got a couple of nice mentions in the new issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly, which may be the best general interest magazine about Buddhism. They came in an article called “Next-gen Buddhism: The future of Buddhism in a post-baby boomer world.”
The article features Rod Meade Sperry, of The Worst Horse, on a four-person panel discussing the topic. He mentions the ID project favorably more than once, but the most salient point of the discussion for me was the following:

Sumi Loundon Kim (author of Blue Jean Buddha: Voices of Young Buddhists): . . .The current dharma scene lacks a social instinct and avenues for social engagement, which is a very big part of what it is to be young. A lot of Buddhist practitioners and would-be practitioners crave a sense of belonging and a sense of being with people who are like them to explore similar issues. There is just not sufficient support for that.

Rod Meade Sperry: The Interdependence Project model is the antithesis of that. It’s about community, discussion inquiry, asking questions, and interacting with the teacher like the teacher is your friend, because the teacher actually is your friend. Beyond that, there are guest speakers on diverse topics and a variety of events. It’s a place where people can come and get dharmic influence, but they can also get much more. How many people don’t go to a center not just because they don’t have the time, but because on some level, why would they want to?

Sumi Loudon Kim: It’s so lonely there.

I think this sums up one of our main strengths very well (group hug).
The conversation, which also featured a college student with retreat experience and Zoketsu Norman Fischer, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, was wide ranging and touched upon a number of other important issues. One of the overarching questions was, what do people want from Buddhism, and how much of it are they able and willing to incorporate into their lives? As the moderator puts it, “will the tensions between the popular, simpler forms and the traditional forms continue into the next generations?”
That discussion was framed for me by a polemic published in the same issue by Samuel Bercholz, founder of Shambhala Publications (and also an Acharya in the Shambhala community, although he doesn’t seem to be a very active teacher anymore in that context, as far as I can tell). He excoriates longtime western dharma teachers who are “calling for a change in the way Buddhism is taught,” calling them “whiners and complainers” and “Buddhist roadkill—the ones who feel that Buddhism didn’t deliver for them so they want to change it.” I happen to agree with his point in general terms (about being too quick to change, discard and amend the tradition), but find his assertions overly reductive, and I think the belligerence and name calling undermine the point.
My personal feeling is that the most accessible and immediately helpful aspects of Buddhism—mindfulness and awareness training, methods of cultivating good qualities and working with negative emotional states, an articulation of our fundamental interconnectedness—should be made as available as possible to a wide audience. These are best presented in the context of a healthy, friendly community. And the world desperately needs this wisdom right now, and people have been doing what they can with what they have.
But, as Bercholz cautions, we should also be careful about what we label “Buddhism” if we boil it down to just the aforementioned, because there is a vast and profound tradition behind those aspects, much of which doesn’t fit seamlessly into our conventional outlook. There are fundamental religious dimensions to Buddhism that aren’t for everyone with a casual interest, nor should they be, but neither should they be blithely bowdlerized without acknowledgment. And, as Bercholz notes, “what’s been presented so far is just the tip of the iceberg of the teachings.”
Buddhism is not a 2,500 year-old monolith. In some sense there are many Buddhisms, and they have always been in a continual process of considerable evolution. But, just to give one example, when one reads about the incredible hardship that Tibetans endured to retrieve and translate painstaking a vast corpus of Indian Buddhist literature, it should give one pause. A large majority of the Tibetan translators died crossing the Himalayas or in India, and yet tens of thousands of pages of writing was ultimately translated very faithfully and then studied assiduously. We’ve barely begun to replicate anything like that. The more religious aspects of the dharma may turn out to have little relevance to our lives, but we’re a long way away from being in a position to make that conclusion.
I would suggest for the time being drawing a provisional distinction between popular “Buddhist-influenced” practice, which is completely valid on its own terms for its own ends (and is indeed essential to the world right now, and to the further establishment of Buddhism itself), and Buddhism proper, which is still very much in a nascent stage in the West and in need of careful stewardship. The ID project has done a great job walking this line, in my view.
This is a big discussion, and I feel like I’ve gone on too long already. I’d encourage everyone to have a look at the article, which covers other interesting topics as well. Very worthwhile.