In our case, the issue is that there are really separate roles for “(re)structuring the forum” and “administering the forum”.
The latter is an IT person, who wants to make sure the site is up and operational, that backups are taken when necessary, and may need to have access to credentials for integrations with other sites. But they are doing this type of work for many systems. They aren’t really interested in thinking deeply about how to build a community, encourage civilized discourse, or work with people across the organization to develop patterns for communicating and sharing knowledge.
The former are people like me, and other official and unofficial leaders and community builders. We spend time thinking about how to encourage people to collaborate, when it’s appropriate to use slack vs. email vs. discourse vs. google docs. We help nudge people across this sea of tools to use them more effectively. But we shouldn’t all necessarily have credentials for our organization-wide authentication system or access to other people’s PMs, or the ability to download the entire database.
The way things are currently designed leaves us in a situation where we are not able to empower as many people as we’d like in the former activities, and/or we may burden the IT folks with things they don’t understand or care about too much.
It’s not a dire situation or anything, but there’s plenty room for improvement.