Though there are many different types of genealogy projects, most are set up along common lines - they rely on volunteers to build and maintain sites that are then linked in to a central directory system. Genealogy and history buffs are no doubt the best people to coordinate location-based projects, as they are the ones who have the greatest interest in the area and are more likely to have useful resources concerning their location. They are not, however, necessarily the best people to be building websites. 

Let's face it, the truly internet-savvy people are not typically inclined to be interested in the kinds of topics that delight us - it's not a young person's hobby as a rule. And while we're all a lot more savvy on the net than we were when a lot of the bigger projects got started, it's probably safe to say that the majority of genealogy fans are not die-hard technologists. So, why has the online genealogy community expected these folks to build all these project websites? Basically, because they had little choice - the folks who were the most interested in projects of this type and had the time to devote to them, were generally older, often retired, and decidedly less techically oriented than their children and grandchildren.

So, our basic idea was to remove the technology hurdle as much as possible and let the genealogy and history folks concentrate on the things they do best, rather than having to worry about learning HTML and javascript and css, etc. We'll design and build the infrastructure  and the site framweworks and take care of all the techy stuff - you just add and maintain the data.