We use Discourse as our primary office because half of our staff work remotely. In conjunction with Zoom for video meetings. But everything is documented in and coordinated with Discourse.
Case 1.
We often do extensive brainstorming; asking for scenarios, probabilities of each scenario, suggested responses to each; executive summaries etc.
We typically give a one to three days deadline for submission. Sometimes one to two weeks, as some of these require extensive research and several iterations before satisfactory conclusion.
Our objective of getting each person’s totally original input so far often gets defeated by the fact that late submitters simply ape or build on the earlier submissions, or at times just plagiarise.
Then we resorted to asking everybody to submit at a predetermined time.
Some fail this and still submit one to two hours late, still leveraging on the work of those that submitted earlier.
We have since come to the conclusion that the best solution is for each person to write their POST within the same topic, at their own convenience, then schedule it to be sent at that same predetermined time.
This will require an icon for SCHEDULED SEND, separate from the regular SEND icon.
This will achieve all the objectives, and could simply use the services of the already existing timed reminder service.
Case 2.
Another use case is this.
For the next 3 days for example, all hands must be on deck to focus on finishing a time-bound deliverable, for example a major event.
Some other important matter comes up, that is inappropriate to publish during this season so as not to dilute the focus.
Management decision is to release it 2 days after the event. It’s more desirable to formulate and implement this decision immediately, striking while the iron is hot, but to defer release of the post or topic until the time deemed best.
For us, it’s not a like to have. It’s totally essential.
This feature will dramatically increase the capacity of Discourse to be used not just as a discussion forum, but as a productivity tool.