An IT budget is just one aspect of this. Perhaps a larger aspect is finding a volunteer or volunteers who have the time to do administration, hardware, and software troubleshooting, and to implement new technologies as desired or needed. It is one thing to serve lunches under a tent for an event. It is quite a lot more complex to back up a database server or troubleshoot why it is down. And then what does an admin team do when the web server is attacked in some way. When you need to replace 4 hard drives that night, where does the money come from and how will the new devices be obtained? The skills needed are tough to come by. The people who volunteer — and it would have to be a volunteer team — can easily be opening themselves to a lot of criticism when the site goes down or has problems for whatever reason.
Suppose persons A and B volunteer to be the forum technicians/maintainers/troubleshooters. These people both register for the next Cider Ride. The night before the ride, an operating system update is applied to the only server and suddenly the php binary crashes. It won’t load and start up, and the operating system update can’t be rolled back, which means the forum goes down until the cause is figured out and a fix is applied. Persons A and B are going to miss The Cider Ride and will be most unhappy.
Funding is definitely an issue, but people resources are potentially a larger issue.
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