The specific usage scenario I envision is to allow schools that follow similiar philosophies[basically following an open source model to organizing and running the school, where students are part of the process not passive receivers of the process. Two example of this would be the Brooklyn Free School, http://www.brooklynfreeschool.org/ and my childrens school, the Hudson Valley Sudbury School, http://www.hudsonvalleyschool.org/] to share information and discuss issues at both the student level and at the staff and assembly level.
However, just like in the open source movement there are license fanatics[some GPL folks don't think the BSD folks are "pure" enough, and there are BSD folks who don't think GPL folks are "free" enough], in these schooling communities there are conflicts between schools on "purity" and "outlook" of philosophy. So while the option for each school to have their own forum is powerful, and being able to share discussion about shared interest is very important, at the same time each school needs to have the right to choose not to associate/discuss issues in a public manner with other schools when and where there are personality conflicts. I am sure there are other communities like this that may appreciate the ability to bother interact and have the choice to not interact. LGBT community centers, Animal Sanctuaries, etc. So my first look into this is to see if there is anything close to this sort of functionality out there in forums. The closes I see at the moment is FUDforum's ability to sync via NNTP or email list - but then your back to having a central repository to sync to[the list or newsgroup] where really the sites need to have a more personal and dynamic method of establishing connections. A few steps further would be how to handle mod deletions of posts on the source forum when syncing, groups that may wish to also have their own deletion control over external posts internally[and deciding to trust other groups deletion choices as well], and how to handle the inevitable snit fit when two groups fall out and decide to ban each other - do past posts get yanked or left. That sort of thing.
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