I can’t find any existing posts on this for some reason, I briefly touched on it here, but we have had a number of people propose this to us, and I think it’s a good idea. I call it panel discussions.
Use case:
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You have a panel of 5 experts and a moderator who want to have a moderated discussion on a topic with community input.
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The 5 experts and moderator are granted write access to a new “panel discussion on foo” topic. All other users can read the topic (and maybe favorite, flag, etc), but cannot write new replies.
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A parallel discussion topic is started for the general public. Let’s call it “back room discussion on foo.” Any community member in good standing can read or write to this topic (you could maybe limit it to TL1 if you want or TL2). The purpose of this topic is to generate questions for the experts to answer.
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The moderator will have two browser windows open, one in the panel discussion topic and the other in the back room. From time to time, the moderator will identify good questions and copy them over (probably manually) to the panel discussion in this form:
in {link to post in back room topic}, @exampleusername asks:
What kind of florbit do you use on your foo, and why? What florbit would you recommend?
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The experts answer the question and talk amongst themselves in the Panel Discussion topic, while the community can kibitz and throw out ideas for questions in the Back Room topic.
We’re fairly close to having this, we just need some idea of per-topic override permissions in special cases. What do you think @sam?