RE: images.

I went down the same path with Picture Mgr for council staff and a cms I once ran, with mixed results.

I came across the same issue for another LG client this year, and decided it was easier all round if that contributor had a Flickr account. (substitute Flickr with your own preference from hereon in)

I cannot pretend that anything I would make to permit the uploading of images could be as good as Flickr, so why bother?

Other benefits became immediately obvious:

*There is a chance they already HAD a Flickr account anyway.

*Depending upon privacy and ownership settings, each image can also bring traffic directly from Flickr (stick a URL in the description, SEO goodness eh?)

*I can call groups of images to make galleries, and slide shows with a bit of work, they LIKE that.

*The photo processing, resizing is not done on my server, nor is the storage (Great!)

*For the uninitiated it is a great shoe-in to grokking the “social web”, “Look you are sharing, doesn’t it feel good?”

*Flickr is itself contains social web attributes like groups, friends and messaging.

There are more benefits, the tagging tools are super, the library is available to all – Councillors included.

My example is a CMS for staff, but it could just as easily be images from Councillors available for staff to use.

I am sure more benefits will emerge as time goes on.

So, while agree with your “basic rights” summary, with some thought I think you could narrow that down to a “net- book” and a connection to the web.

With:
A Flickr account (pro) 25 usd
A blog (that could be managed and tooled up centrally)
A URL
A gmail account

A centrally managed Blog may hold some drawbacks, but the ability to embed Flickr, Twitter and FB streams should circumvent that.