Delegating community management
Because this is a wild brainstorm, and I just saw this topic Calling out for volunteer Community Managers 
… I thought:
→ What if community management was federated?
You are fresh community manager on a newly installed Discourse forum, a complete noob on the admin interface and community-building practices. What if you could call in the help of an experienced community manager for certain period of time to advise you and look over your shoulder?
Now I know y’all are going to say: “Why not just create a staff account on that forum… no federation needed!” and you’d be right. But let’s turn it around and maybe make this more interesting: What if I wanted to offer my Discourse and community management skills either as volunteer or professional (i.e. paid)?
I’d want to be able to productively handle as many communities as possible in my ‘customer portfolio’. This leads to a triple win:
- New community managers can obtain onboarding service to get them started more quickly.
- Community managers can benefit more broadly from their skills, beyond their own community.
- The two previous bullets mean Discourse has added another USP to their product.
How would this look like then? I don’t know… many possibilities. Some suggestions, where in each of them the delegated admin works from their own forum portal via federation, managing potentially many communities:
- Delegated admin can set forum Settings, install plugins/components/css, which the real admin approves before they take effect.
- Delegated admin has access to Staff-only categories and groups and participates in discussions to give their advice.
- Delegated admin handles flags raised in the forum, where only the topic with the flag is federated to their portal.
- Delegated admin, knowing the community landscape, helps arrange partnerships with other communities, and sharing of content.
Consider from above the following:
This may also be a value-added service and can be combined with the above. All parties involved have an interest in delegated admins being vetted as good community managers to a certain extent. Discourse (the company) may only allow people to become delegated admins if they are on a (paid?) subscription. Discourse or a partner may offer a community management course that, when passed, rewards a certificate with stamp of approval by @codinghorror.
Well… if you like the idea or not. It was a nice brainstorm session for me, ha ha 
Maybe you can make it better?
Edit:
Discourse itself would use this service too. At the start of our paid subscription one member of the Discourse team was part of our forum’s staff to offer the same kind of help. With this they can do that from their own remote ‘cockpit’, or… delegate it.
Another thing that deals with sharing parts of a community… A number of times when I posted a topic on Meta asking for specific help, the topic was made private (sometimes because it contained sensitive information) and dealt with as a ‘Support ticket’ by the Discourse team. With federation I might have the Support part of Meta be integrated in my own forum.