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The idea of any ham radio project should be to pursue fun for the members, service to the goals of ham radio,
and growth and sustainability of the project.
Ham radio is about people using and learning about radio equipment in the pursuit of social interaction by communicating with other people who are using and learning about radio. One of the coolest things about ham radio is the reliance on one's own understanding of radio in order to achieve the desired communications. Creating, maintaining, and using radio capabilities is a necessary part of breaking in to the hobby. Ham radio was one of the first wide-area social networks, and it was one naturally tailored to the tinkerer.
Many people, perhaps most, are given a feeling of fulfillment by becoming a needed part of their chosen social group, which is akin to getting one's 15 minutes of fame. Some find this by establishing a capability that other people will use, like a repeater, or radio club, or packet network. Others are driven to teach, to win, or to be social. Depending on one's situation, career, age, and other factors there also may be the need to relax, or to escape into some task which is completely other than most of one's affairs.
Since ham radio is shrinking, we need to ponder .... ??? How is linking to the Internet universally bad? It isn't. It's good for social. What is it bad for? It is bad for the people who look for the challenge of building radio.
Using Internet to replace capability and functions that could be performed by ham radio, eliminated the utility of doing those functions and having that capability, and takes value away from people who could have made those capabilities and functions their own. Basically the Internet is taking the thunder out of many of the hams and hurting the hobby, for those hams.
To put it another way, Amateur Radio is not capable of sustaining itself as a hobby if all of the benefits of ham radio could be gotten without actually getting on ham radio at all. The uniqueness of ham radio, at least to me, is that all of the people you run into while using it, are also using ham radio. Any feat of engineering or of management, or of organization, or even investment, that we use while talking on the radio, are designed, maintained, arranged, and funded, by hams. This makes it possible for us to recreate, rearrange, and obtain the same capability again and again if we so desire. We can also lend the knowledge and the skills to the new hams, and to later projects. This is part of what always was Amateur "ham" Radio.
The Amateur Radio hobby was made possible early on because there was
no other way to communicate other than to get a ham license, or to
pay out the kind of money that only a large corporation or government could afford.
Even as late as 1990, it was not economically practical to have a long conversation across the United States without ham radio.
It was also not practical to have conversations while mobile or portable.
Intercontinental phone calls were tremendously expensive and ship to shore was very limited.
Until 1990, ham radio was huge because it was the only choice.
Until then we didn't even have to try to promote the hobby.
All you had to do is show people what was possible and those that had the tinkering knack would naturally join us.
That all changed with the outbreak of the Internet, of the independent telephone companies, and of satellite telephones. It is no longer necessary for people to join social networks in order to communicate, and yet MySpace and Facebook made it possible for the first time for people to join a wide area social network, without having to become ham radio operators to do so.
The outbreak of social networks makes it really obvious that ham radio could exist, but I don't think it would naturally have sprung out as a government sponsored entity. Think of all of the spectrum space ham radio is granted. Consequently I am not sure that it will survive if we, the hams, don't push to keep it around.