STEEM without Steemit INC? Contingency plans?

After reading this post by @ned, where he discloses the fact that apparently Steemit INC is in trouble, financially, and had to lay of 70% of its staff, I must say I'm a bit worried. I know @reggaemuffin has been putting some efforts into making the core project more of a community effort, but till today, it seems that most of the code base and an important part of the hosting are handled by this private company that apparently is in dire straights at the moment.

While chances are that STEEM will drop below $0.10 before it passes the magic $1.00 again, as most of the crypto market is in a slum right now and we likely haven't seen the bottom yet, it is likely that if Steemit INC doesn't run things by going bankrupt without any contingency plans for the platform, that STEEM shall be well above the $1.00 mark before spring next year.

If we assume for now things will be alright with the smaller (and obviously slower) version of Steemit INC, the fact remains that at this moment Steemit INC and its potential to go belly up appears to be a liability for the platform.

As such, I feel strongly that STEEM users, investors, witnesses , and importantly, everyone of us with VESTS to delegate or development skills to contribute need to put our heads together and start thinking contingency plans.

I haven't given this a massive amount of thought yet, and the big problem I fear is, nobody actually has at this moment, but we really should stick our heads together and start thinking what we need to actually plan for just in case Steemit INC ends up going belly up, hosting gets canceled and the code base gets orphaned. How do we keep the boat afloat first, and running again later?

Things I can come up from the top of my head that we should be looking at are:

• We need developer tutorials for the code-base so contingency devs can be quickly up to speed if need be.
• We really need to all support @reggaemuffin and @utopian-io in opening up the process and code in terms of making it considerably more of a community effort than it is today.
• We need an independent non-profit to own stuff like domain names that can be a pain to get hold of if a private does belly up.
• We need to really scale up JSON-RPC node decentralization.

Maybe some of the things here aren't actually needed and without a doubt others are missing, it is just a short list to help make you think about these things.

Let us all hope and pray that we won't ever need contingency plans and that Steemit INC will recover and start growing again in a few months when the crypto market picks up again, but at the same time, let us try to hedge our bets. I am pretty sure that the platorm at this moment in time would not be sufficiently prepared to stay afloat if Steemit INC was to go bankrupt overnight.

I believe the @utopian-io crew and @reggaemuffin could and should play a leading role in contingency planning, and I also believe they would need a lot of help, both in pledged hours and delegated SP, in order to create something close to a good contingency plan.

Personally I'd pledge three hours a week to any such project and I'dd delegate 300 SP, and I think with motivated project leads, so would many others. I have no doubt I'm not the only one who is scared witless at the moment by the prospect that Steemit INC might not make it through to the other side on this one without a contingency plan being in place for if the worst case scenario actually ends up playing out.

o