Perhaps I read into this wrong, Win, but I got the impression that you are not suggesting that Perlmonks keeps our addresses and such, but that individual monks keep them. I am assuming here, then, that you intend for friends to keep each others' addresses, and/or that monks should be encouraged to put perlmonks.org in their address list near their will such that their family/executor would find it and post the obituary (possibly via email) to Perlmonks.

As such, I see no opportunity for spamming (since jeffa wouldn't send his address to you, nor would he send his address to anyone he didn't feel he could trust not to give it to you).

That said, I have little reason to believe that this would "work". I'm sure there are many people here who have each others' personal email addresses. I'm not sure whether family/executors look at such lists for notification consistently, and when they do, I'm not sure whether said friend would post it here. If they do, however, I imagine this would fit under Perl News just fine (I could see a debate about whether it'd be Perl News or Perlmonks Discussion, but I doubt that many would argue at the time).

As for representatives sent to funerals, perhaps that's normal in your culture, but I'm sure most people in N. America would find it somewhat awkward if they had never met the deceased face-to-face prior to the funeral (and thus a likely source of downvotes: "-- (ooo, icky!)"; another source, of course, is any suggestion for a new section).