a trusted, motivated person
There's the rub. Motivated people are rare, and trusted people far rarer. The intersection of the two sets is vanishingly small.
Even so, some gods are fairly active in site improvement initiatives. Corion deserves special recognition for the work he's done in trying to upgrade the database and the version of mod_perl used by PerlMonks. He's also been very good about applying my patches. Corion++.
Between the mind which plans and the hands which build, there must be a mediator... and this mediator must be the heart.