OK, so I've been thinking a lot about how to get tribe moving ahead. Raising cash to keep it alive and fund some hardware improvements was definitely the first step, and it looks like it was moderately successful. Not enough yet to hire another engineer, but enough to keep the lights on a bit longer and keep the server fans spinning. It's time to move to the next stage or all the gains will be lost. If tribe doesn't show some significant improvement, then few are going to bother to renew their membership, and it's back to the slow decline into irrelevancy.

Obviously, Darren is way overloaded and overextended. There's no way he can be expected to do all the technical work that needs to be done, between overall maintainence and implementing & testing new features, while also responding to user's technical questions.

What tribe needs is a different sort of support from the users. Tribe users love this site, and we're willing to pitch in to keep it going. Tribe needs to take advantage of this loyalty by allowing users to take on some of the technical & administrative tasks. I propose the creation of a managably small "Tribe Volunteer Corps", that takes on this role.

I propose starting with five or so volunteers filling these roles:

1) Administrative assistant: Answer user questions & complaints, seek out functionally unmoderated tribes and recruiting new moderators, act as liasons in official tribes, and carry out basic duties such as backups.
2) Junior developer: As Darren commented, there's a lot of partly implemented or simply implemented features that tribe could roll out in short order, if there were only some developer time to look at them. There's plenty of seasoned Java developers out there who would love the opportunity to move things along. Overtime these people would come to learn the code base and would be able to implement more complex functionality, but the initial role would be the basic stuff.
3) QA engineer: Someone who handles testing of new features, investigates bugs and regresses fixes.
4) Volunteer management/project management: Someone to give some oversight to the other volunteers, in terms of tracking projects and evaluating priorities.

Community-based development has been an incredibly successful model, giving us world class operating systems, servers & services, browsers and applications. I'm not talking about open-sourcing the site or anything like that. I realize that tribe won't and probably shouldn't go down that path. However, for relatively little expense and risk, tribe could buy itself some very talented and motivated folks who want nothing more than to give a little time to keep their favorite site humming along and keeping up with the times.

Tribe? Darren? Wendy? Mark?

Whaddya say?