Well, you can always set up the governance in a way that separates the meat of continuing to add to the site in order to advance what it should become and dealing with users and policy. In any event, this is long-term. Obviously with your vision for the site you want to run with that and do everything you can. I can tell from the way you've set things up that you want to make something that's got some real integrity and I don't see you deviating from that path, I'm more talking about way down the road. The one thing you might want to do to protect your project from yourself is make something that protects it from being sold to some huge company that doesn't care about your ideals, unless you can somehow legally hold them to the charter.

But we've had situations before where we had coders and what not who had very little to do with the every-day running of the site in terms of user related stuff. It was really best when they were kept above the internal politics of the staff and of the site at large. Again, though, this is basically several 'generations' of staff members after the first site, we're talking years later. The members of the original staff that we did still have on board were exactly those guys I described. They'd sit back, work on their project, let the young guns handle the users and argue about policy with one another, and work on cool additions to the site or occasionally swoop in to set things right when the staff is a shit show. We actually had a guy who was still around in that later capacity years after he stopped coding stuff for the site. It's not a bad contingency.

Of course this is all from a site that had about 1000 active users at its peak. If Hubski ends up scaling up to something much larger than that, it's a pretty different ballpark. I would think the same principles should still apply to the staff though.

But yeah, that's all a long way off. The best way to have things is to keep the founders in there, active, and giving a shit as long as humanly possible. You're going to have a better idea of your vision for the site than someone who just wanders in thinking "oh, cool, huge internet community" after things take off. Even then, you should watch out for admins who don't understand your vision of the site. You don't want to allow them to undermine it. Even when you're around I'd imagine you'll eventually need some help if the site gets huge.

Although honestly, I've never seen a site with this sort of design before. The worst a new admin could do is, what, overzealously delete posts? That'd be pretty easy to review if it's at least just a soft delete. Are you guys having to delete a lot of spam as it is or do you mostly just let the filtering handle it?