Desiging a capability Forum and Chat. What web-based capability file systems could be used to implement this?

[John Carlson]

So I've got the idea to set up a Forum and Chat to solve the world's problems with the disabled community contributing as major players.  I figure the chat and forum will be based on the same data structure, a hierarchy or directed graph.  Probably the later to avoid ambient authority.  However, I will describe it in terms of a hierarchy.  The leaves of the hierarchy would be messages with authors. Leaves may be gathered into groups which become chats or forums.  Some groups may be included as messages in a higher level group.  There may or may not be a root group with topic groups of politics, religion, philosophy, economics, science, ...  Leaves have authors and groups have moderators.  Moderators may hand out capabilities for authors to post to a group, and revoke capabilities as well.    Moderators would also create subgroups.  There would be a public forum (root?) or chat where people could meet, discover groups, and get invited to groups.

This seems very filesystem-like and I'm wondering if there is an appropriate web-based capability file system this could be implemented in.  In addition, has a chat system like this been implemented on top of a file system and could the chat system could be donated to this effort, or rented for a fee--we pay you to run the website, do backups, etc?   We would like to set up our own moderators, if possible.

This seems very doable to me, I am just wondering if anyone has done it and software is available as a service or free.

I am not sure how many people read this.

John

[John Carlson]

In particular, I am interested in how to send chat groups to the forum group as a message, perhaps daily.  I have tried Sandstorm.io chat, but I don't see the integration with the forum.  I am also willing to do some development, as long as the data model matches appropriately, and we don't have to do a lot of rework.

[John Carlson]

Okay, Sandstorm.io forums/groups are called collections.  Can we customize the sandstorm.io interface to call them groups or forums?