Hey Andy, when I went shopping for forum software last year I discovered Discourse. Perhaps you could talk about how your forum would be better that it?
I guess what I want is to take over all the branches of the government and replace them with forum software. But not the forum software we have seen today, an as yet unrealised possibility of what forum software could be!
So thus far having looked at Discourse how does it implement my ideas:
1) Nope, tagging in the HN style doesn't exists AFAIK.
2) Yes, mobile
3) Yes, Skinnable
4) Hosted/Can create your own DNS/Community/Rules/etc
5, 6, 7) It seems more focused on finding solutions to specific problems (I'm using the twitter API does it do X) rather than having a broad discussion and them being able to select answers from that discussion to refine into a crowd sourcing campaign.
8) Grouping of threads by tag and different tag types.
9) Discourse have a business model that's pretty sound. Charge for hosting.
10) Directory of useful people on each forum who can be paid to do stuff...
11) How are we discussing these YC programs - I think there is a lot of room for improvement being able to tag posts to the top of the thread and give a TLDR of the salient points in a thread.
Maybe people can summarise questions and break things down into pieces that can be answered in a more coherent package.
If deemed suitable by the community the thread could then be acted on through a crowd sourcing campaign.
Imagine if we were to organise society with a piece of forum software how would it look and what would people get in return for helping their community - probably more voting rights and better ability to change things/make a difference.