A little over a year and a half ago, I turned over the running of the SDMC to parents of students at the SDMC. They had already taken over many parts of the operation, but as of December, 2006, I was back to just teaching and not really involved with any of the operations. Since then, I think the SDMC has been run much better, as it's not being run by someone for whom the SDMC is the 4th or 5th math-related thing on his todo list. As evidence of that, take a look at the new SDMC website. The old-timers at AoPS might remember the old SDMC site embedded in AoPS, and not much maintained, as we had all of AoPS to worry about. This self-contained webpage is much better, and is an indication why it's much better for me not to be involved with the administration of the SDMC.

In a related note, I gave up running West Coast ARML to Paul Dreyer at about the same time, for the same reason -- I spend a great deal of time working on math-related things. I can't bring the passion needed to do these other math-related things when it's the 60th hour in a given week that I'm doing them. A lesson for me, I think -- my "extra" stuff can't be closely related to my professional life. I think that's why Paul is much better at running West Coast ARML and David Brown (and before him, Henry Lau) is much better running the SDMC than I was -- these are pursuits close to their heart, but not very close to their professions.