Thanks Paul, there's some really great stuff there (worth a read, LordFord).
I'm still left wondering about a few practical things though - for example, how is hosting things like the VCS, the mirrors, etc. organised and paid for (or maybe it isn't paid for, hence the partners?) Who organises official events and how are they organised? Who funds events, if anyone? This sort of stuff... maybe it's all outsourced to SPI?
Curious about this, as in Drupal there's "the Drupal Association" which is a centralised organisation that basically handles all this stuff - but in consequence, it also needs a pretty big operating budget! Wondering how Debian avoid this, or how they manage it, if it's simply unavoidable for a large FOSS project?
Cheers,
Greg