@olsen
Quite a volume of well thought out and well intentioned posts from this thread. I'll respond briefly, to save some white space...
A community contract I'm not so sure of. We have had organized goodwill operations in the Amiga community by the dozen, and where are we now?
(1)Initiatives made in public are often well intentioned, but often doomed from the start for the very reason you state in your posts concerning community reaction.
(2)You know as well as I that unless you do a significant amount of research ahead of time, you are apt to draw a short sighted conclusion about what direction to take.
(3)All of this takes us back to "business", something which -all things amiga- is not.
Anyone who has yet to realize that poor communications is apt to be the amiga legacy, just hasn't been very intimately involved with same. That much is certain.
Personally, I'd not start with something that lends itself to shaping into an organization that produces yet more words on the screen. It would help to know what the Amiga community would find helpful, if it were to materialize through the hard work of developers.
I see some of that happening right now with the MUI/zune initiative, although I regret it appeared in public quite the way it did, again...for those reasons you expressed about community response.
I feel that when people start to talk about "limited resources" and use the term "hobby" over and over again, to describe current affairs, the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. More times than I can count I've posed the notion that just because we are who we are should -not- preclude us from employing some businesslike thinking.
I'm not going to waste time detailing the failures of the past on this score.
#6