Too Big to Know--is Leitergate a microcosm of a much larger phenomenon?

Here at the Rotman conference on Climate Science, Paul Edwards is talking about "knowledge infrastructures" and how the production of knowledge has radically changed over the last 20 years from a much more individualistic enterprise, with pyramids of expertise, peer review, etc to a much more distributed model.   He mentioned this popular book Too Big to Know.    I wonder if this sort of transition is hiting philosophy and is being fought out in the various debates about the PGR and its possible more distributed alternatives.   Is this a fight about whether Philosophy should be preserving its pyramids of expertise, or be moving to more distributed model of credibiility sanctioning?