That is interesting. How big is your community going to be? How many members and how many families? Are they all related to each other or is each family completely distinct and separate from every other family? If it’s a smallish number, you could create these groups and secure categories for them.
I think my personal forum is similar to the one you want to set up. It is mostly for me to keep track of various projects and information, and then I have been gradually inviting other people to come and join me. Some conversations I need to be private between a few people (e.g. me, my partner and our children), some are for wider groupings of people (me and my siblings and my father, or for a few people to work on something together), and then there are others I want everyone on the site to be able to access. I can and do do this manually, but it can get confusing. Some people have been reluctant to join and post because they don’t feel comfortable not knowing exactly who can see what.
I also maintain a neighborhood forum. It would be interesting to let people in the neighborhood match themselves up because they live in the same house and give them a category to talk to each other privately, and also for others in the neighborhood to know who lives together. Currently we do this via a contact spreadsheet and a custom user field.
At the moment, Discourse is not created to host this kind of setup because to some extent it is not in the interest of supporting sustainable communities. You want to have the smallest number of categories you can get away with that as many people as possible can access. For the rest there is chat and personal messages. Though maybe if you are a programmer you could figure out a way to automatically create groups, categories and then add them to the sidebar. If you do, please share your work here!
Personally, I am interested in improving how groups and categories are created. Some features I’d like:
- ability to simultaneously create a group and a secure category accessible by that group
- allow a subset of users, eg members of a certain group, to do (1) and become category moderators of their categories and group owner of their groups
- ability to find out by username which users have access to a given topic, and a given category
The idea of a (4) here to do (2) automatically upon signup is interesting, perhaps using Discourse Automation. But in that case who becomes the category moderator? I think if your community is not too large this could be done manually and coordinated via discussions in the feedback category.