I_Am_gR00T,
I have been fooling around with discourse the last few months in an effort to create a forum for my alternative medicine community. We currently have two functioning businesses, one of them a Cannabis Private Equity fund will need some site development shortly. The other, a Nutraceutical company that produces medicine from some amazing plants, needs a forum ASAP for their researches and community at large to share ideas more freely.
Our current project is to create a forum where our researchers and community members can co-habitat one forum. We want to leverage the power of Discourse to enhance the connections made between seemingly unconnected ideas. We are looking for a very minimalist design, and just want to get the forum up with a few basic features. Over the course of the next few months we will add a lot of functionality, hopefully some of it aiding the Discourse community, by sharing the code 
The first “Development” project is described in depth and would add more power to the concept of a group. Decentralized command 
the features we are looking for are as follows:
We would like a minimalist layout for the front page, similar to See example 1
the goal being to present all the potential categories immediately on the front page. their are some things i don’t like about this example, but we’ll talk about that later.
We need to be able to have 2-3 categories of post that can be hidden from the main community. And different user classes for each category(e.g. scientist, governing body, corner for accredited members)
So basically nothing new to discourse yet, just need a quick config and setup.
What i really want to add to Discourse is something like this Example of social groups
The ability to create mini research project groups
-have their own category only the can see/edit
-a project leader that can manage the group for me
-This should be set up so its as simple as creating the group, and allowing the Project manager to decide the groups Ontology for their categories.
I don’t want to have to micro manage my research groups ability to communicate, and i don’t want to segment my researches to a poorly designed project management software(away from the main community)… Discourse, with a few mods will make a great workflow MGMT software 
we would love to fund some of that development… I know Joomla and Drupal are big on their devs fixing code while working on commercial sites and then implementing the code after its shared, is this true of the Discourse community?