@HAWK Thanks for replying! It’s good to know there is someone with lots of experience with this, and at the helm of Discourse! Very cool.
Excellent. Any suggestions for how to find such communities (whose admins might be open to giving me a tour and/or the benefit of their wisdom)? I spent a long while looking on https://discover.discourse.org/ and searching around here at the Meta community.
Interesting. It’s very possible I am not pursuing an orthodox version of CoP. I know of the Wenger-Trayners’ defining work, and most recently I’ve been following Rosie Sherry at rosie.land. But really I’m winging it for my own purposes, which don’t align exactly with either of those models.
Neither my use case nor audience are laser focused (yet), but I am definitely honing in on a certain type of person and approach to lifelong learning that I’m trying to enable and promote. (“Lifelong learning” can mean an awful lot of things. Who isn’t a “lifelong learner” these days!?)
One big struggle is finding (and onboarding, and learning to work with) good beta testers who can give constructive feedback – without derailing everything, or distracting me from progress. I’m frankly fearful, although a bit desperate for input at this point. I’m sure this isn’t an unusual mindset hurdle at this stage.
My Discourse set-up currently has a category devoted to “Practices,” which I am trying to keep simple but pack a lot of value into. I’ve decided to take a time-based approach to community “check-ins” with prompts designed to make reflection and member posts productive yet flexible, for gentle accountability. One specific struggle I’m having with Discourse is how to automate daily and weekly topic posting for community members to reply to. To keep it manageable I need flexibly configured automations, so I’m learning that plugin. But I’m running into quandaries right off the bat.
For example, I need to put dates in the topic title. It seems this is not possible (e.g. Inserting date/time into new topic's title field (ie, right here > !) - #11 by meave).
I also need to keep automated check-in topics in chronological order, which according to a long-standing debate here (that I don’t really understand), can only be done by adjusting creation dates and not by alpha-numeric sorting on titles.
Another consideration is how to prepare to bring new people (not just beta testers) into the community. I want to be both open and accessible but also selective (and go paid for members who will have access to everything – there needs to be financial support to make it viable). I’ve been following @Paul_King’s efforts on using automations for an application, approval, and group placement process (Alternative sign up pathways - #39 by tgustilo) for different kinds of members. Improved admin control over final group placement and profiles seems to be necessary.
I’m making good progress using the new docs plug-in for one category, and I’m thinking I’ll use a wiki for another category for members to crowd-source learning resources – ideally with subject-matter experts to moderate and edit submissions. I need to make all that user-friendly, which will mean providing quite a bit of training for would-be wiki contributors on how to use Discourse (how to submit a wiki post).
And in general, I’m worried about how to provide sufficient but not overwhelming onboarding for non-technical members, who are increasingly used to using other community software that is a lot less sophisticated, in how one navigates, posts, gains access, is granted permissions, etc. I’m pretty tech savvy (as a non-engineer) but it’s been a learning curve for me even as a member, much less an admin.
I’m still looking for the best way, as an admin, to review and test what members (of different groups, levels) see. I have yet to find the right discussion here on Meta to enlighten me on that. I’m not looking to “impersonate” an actual member but merely to see the community as a regular member, not an admin – ideally without having to create a number of test users and keep logging in and out.
There’s more, but that’s a lot! 
Basically I’m working back and forth between many considerations at various levels, as I’m sure you can imagine: theoretical, technical, social, taking account of my own and others’ experience, trying to anticipate future members needs and delights. It’s a lot for one person, and I’m actively looking for community support myself. 
Again, thanks for chiming in. I’m excited to see what you might recommend.