Well if you look back to the much earlier days a lot of good things came from the allocation. Most of it was the work of Phil Karn and a few others. And maybe it would be good to document that stuff, as most of it was before my time. I know Phil and Brian Kantor were active with the development of RFC's. This contribution was was something that extends beyond ham radio. Phil's NOS development really changed a lot of things. Lead to some FCC rules being changed etc.
Again, I am not the person with all the history, but just wanted to make a few brief points. I do hear you though, now-a-days, ham radio in general is in a pretty sad state. You could easily replace the words "our /8 network is of great value these days" with our allocated frequencies are of great value these days. I do agree we really need to reach out to the hacker/makerspace people.
I wrote this a number of years ago for our club: http://www.k9eam.org/2011/06/innovating-makerspaces.html
There have been a small handful of us that attend their meeting and help them with things. A few got licensed, but so far no one has really dug in deep into the radio side yet. At least the goodwill has been established.
Like anything in the hobby and world in general, it takes the right(ambitious) people to make amazing things happen.
Steve
What *new* technologies has been developed because of this network? Which crises have been mitigated using this network? Have it helped to spread the HAM radio "spirit" to the young people? What other good things have this network done?