please feel free to suggest anything that you think might be useful. Thanks :)
If you are looking to explore.
(1) http://www.convflow.com (i worked on an earlier version)
I am a big fan of idea management / collaboration softwares too. More information. Some others I recently started using are (1) http://www.thoughtback.com (useful alone) (2) https://app.thoughtplan.com (useful alone) (3) http://www.hipchat.com (prefer simpler design) or http://www.slack.com (prefer awesome design)
- Google doc - hacker pad - Evernote
If you would like to consider an alternative, I run a site called Postatic (http://postatic.com).
It's a site that let you create online communities (think of it as 'creating your own hackernews'
But you can also make it 'private' so that only invited and approved people can access the site, which makes it ideal for your situation. It might not be 100% perfect for your purpose but would love to have you check it out if you have some time. Happy to answer any questions!
I think that most people who don't know about HN will run away when they see "Hacker" in the title. You are limiting your audience. If you must, it might be best to use Reddit instead. Or maybe rotate between the names of different websites that are similar.
Honestly, I would recommend focusing more on "Community" rather than the "We are the X for Y"
For example, when we want to tell HN users of Postatic, the most effective way we found was to tell them that they can create their own HN site.
I guess for Reddit users, it would be better to target it as "create your own Reddit".
"Community" is good, but there are a plenty of sites that use that word and we also need to stand our.
So right now, we're displaying what's been working the best according to the data - surely it'll evolve.