... active Permission Givers are me (Hello!), Neshomeh, Phobos, Cassie, Techno-Dann, and VixenMage. Araeph is our occasionally-active PG, and Makari... well, I don't actually know about Makari; she was only really on the IRC.
The mucky details of Permission are linked in the Board header ('On Permission to Write PPC Stories'), but basically come down to: hang around a while, come up with some interesting and well-characterised agents, and show us you can write them well (enough).
As for your LotR comments... well, for one, I can't really see where you're coming from with 'boring' and 'passive'. As for the idea of coming up with a summary version of the Legendarium...
Well... Arda is big. I mean, really big. And there's no way of knowing what someone's going to try and reference. They could, say, try and write a Gandalf romance (yeah, it's been done), and claim that he can't have children because he's a demigod. Which is perfectly reasonable - except for the example of Melian. So what you really need is an encyclopaedia - and those exist.
See, the problem isn't that people can't find the information on the Legendarium; it's that they don't go looking in the first place. To pull across your example of religion, a Google search for 'middle earth gods' (no quotes) links directly to Wikipedia's entry for Vala. 'middle earth religion' gives the lotr.wikia entry on the subject, and two lines down, a FAQ about it. The information is absolutely there.
And it's not really something you'd need Permission for, either, if you could come up with a useful way to do it. Permission is for stories, and while I would read a story about a scholar musing on the history of Middle-earth (oh wait, I wrote that), I don't think many would - nor would it be easy to write for any length of time. So while it could be a publication issued by Author Correspondence, it's unlikely to be the subject of DAC stories.
hS