http://www.asic.gov.au/asic/asic_pub.ns ... enDocument
Ack!
Rule me out of participating in a true not-for-profit company. That's all too hard. I've been involved in other formal associations and, in all honesty, the ones who run the association think they are little tin gods.
My personal preference for keeping this site free and open is the informal senate proposal (happy medium) made by Bronce here:
http://forum.geocaching.com.au/viewtopic.php?t=5367
There are interested parties, but there is no-one group that is the be all and end all.
Taking i!'s comments into account, if your IT Guru's aren't interested in coding the requirements, then in all reality those requirements aren't going to get implemented.
That sounds like the IT Guru's weild the power, but that's not the case (or at least it shouldn't be).
Coding up changes is a long and arduous (albeit fun) excersize. The latest change (which will be going up soon) to have queries based on your input criteria has taken a full two weeks worth of effort. That's probably 2-3 hours a day over 14 days for a total of around 40 hours. It's still only in development while it's being tested. That takes about a week. Then there's a beta stage where the beta testers get to break things. That's another week. So from go to implementation is a minimum of 4 weeks of strenuous effort by the coders.
A group of Honchos deciding to make change that the coders don't see as 'fun' will be a hard change to implement without the IT Guru's on side.
At the moment, the IT side is owned by i!. We are trying to determine how best to fund an alternative server so we can take the load of the server that i! is providing for free. The issue is cost. The IT Guru's will still administer the new server, make changes, fix bugs, etc.
If we can find the funding for the first year (including purchasing the server) then incremental year on year costs are achievable by donations (hopefully). We really don't know the costs.
So, in summary, I would prefer an environment similar to what we have now with a single exception which is a community owned server.
Everyone is free to make suggestions for improvement. The IT Guru's make the ocde changes as time and interest allows. Everyone continues to have fun without the drudgery of a formal association.