Category Naming / Site Organization Conventions?

There is a partial list of Discourse sites here https://www.discourse.org/customers. I have looked through many of them, but haven’t seen any examples where they are structured for the type of discussion you are proposing. I do think that Discourse could be used in this way.

I’ve started looking for off-line examples of roundtable type discussions to see if they could provide some ideas for how to structure a Discourse forum. Having a real-world model and working backwards from it seems like a good approach. Here’s an example:

Given this model, the theme of the forum would be ‘Creating an elder-friendly community.’ The four categories for discussion would be ‘Addressing needs’, ‘Promoting engagement’, ‘Optimizing health’, and ‘Maximizing independence.’ The subcategories would be each of the points listed in the diagram. If it didn’t seem like it was adding too much complexity, you could create groups and assign each group to discuss a specific subcategory. (You can set permissions on a category that will allow you to do this.)

Yes, if you create a new topic from a category or a subcategory page it will be given the current category or subcategory. There is an option for the user to change the category from a drop-down menu. Topics can also be recategorized by an admin.

It might be worth setting up a private instance of Discourse for the purpose of testing things out.