This is from another topic I created (https://forum.cardano.org/t/how-to-make-sure-cardano-does-not-end-up-as-an-aws-blockchain/), but would like to spin off the subtopic from there as being quite a different direction.
I believe a fully decentralized cryptocurrency such as Cardano requires a fully decentralized dedicated organization from the members of the Community to manage the sustainability over the next decades. Not sure whether Cardano Foundation is meant to transform into such an organization one day, but it would make sense to offload certain functions and keep them operating in parallel for a while.
Such an organization would be incentivized via regular compensation from the Treasury (OPEX cost), it would be elected via liquid democracy, have a clear multidimensional structure, agenda & mandate, goals & targets and corresponding measures & metrics. Maybe even have some sort of empowerment to influence / configure the Platform in some extent via multiple approval cycles (including the Community Approval itself).
Members of such an organization would take certain roles such as Guardian (overlook, monitor & supervise some essential quality of Cardano such as infrastructure decentralization), Priest (evangelist of Cardano bringing the message to new communities and proposing candidates for various roles for the Organization), Doctor (providing quality support & aid for any problem someone might have with Cardano), Fighter (fighting the trolls, fake news, hackers or any enemy of Cardano), Scientist (monitoring the platform qualities and suggesting configuration updates for optimization), Wizard (proposing “next best” items to the Cardano roadmap along the Product & Adoption Vision in the context of the continuously changing environment), Inspector (reviewing the operation & performance of members of the Cardano Organization with the previous roles), etc.
Members would have their reputation to manage within the Cardano community providing regular, transparent & verifiable updates of their operations and justification / proofs of the value they bring to the Ecosystem.
The challenge would be to make the decentralized Organization to be well-meaning, efficient, incorruptible and transparent bringing tremendous human intelligence dedicated to make Cardano sustainable.
As an example: in the main topic linked above, I was referring to having licences granted / revoked to Stake Pools depending on their reputation and whether they support the infrastructure decentralization quality of Cardano via not running their nodes through a cloud provider, BUT on premise. You could delegate such responsibility to the decentralized organization.