Using Open Atrium to manage the communication, collaboration, and content publishing of multiple sub-groups

Hey LA Drupal Ninjas!

Happy New Year! A wonderful new not-for-profit community project was recently born and could use some love from the drupal ninja community, at this stage, in the form of a bit of advice and direction.

Recently Starhawk,

http://www.starhawk.org/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Starhawk/165408987031

who is one of the most prolific and influential social and environmental justice activists alive today came to town to lead a workshop entitled:

"The Magic of Co-Creation"

http://starhawksblog.org/?page_id=230&event_id=90

During one segment of the workshop we broke out into self-selected "affinity groups" by theme to begin collaborative brainstorming on visions for community building and problem solving within the context of the theme named by the group, e.g. "Urban Homesteading".

Since the mid December workshop a coalition has formed to sustain momentum, maintain and grow the established groups, and facilitate the formation of new groups.

While a series of disintegrated facebook and/or google groups will work to maintain a base level of communication within groups, the lack of integration with other collaboration features makes a drupal organic groups environment seem more appropriate. Also, independence from closed source platforms would be preferred. I know there are apps that pull rss feeds into facebook pages, Does anyone know if something similar to the "Networked Blogs" fb app exists for importing event data and creating fb event pages automatically?

The drupal based system should allow for the creation of subgroups by admins and select users "by role" under a top level parent group that all of the subgroups will feed content back into in various ways (starting with using cck/views with multiple exposed filters on the views to narrow by time, date, location, group, etc).

It should also provide management tools for group admins and have user features including communication (contact form), collaboration (I'm not sure what the best current modules for collaboration there are), and cck based content publishing options per group with limited permissions set per user by role (blog, events, gallery, etc.).

Has anyone used Open Atrium for this kind of a model? .

Any advice on Open Atrium for use by subgroups that are integrated with a parent group would be greatly appreciated.

In summary, the still-forming vision of the system defines the need for it to:

-Allow geographically defined communities to form organic groups (with some admin control)
-Provide a listserv solution for intra-group communication
-Allow content publishing (including blog, galleries, calendar, etc.) by role and with moderation
-Use cck/views to create and sort the display of nodes/content coming from the top level parent group and all the subgroups
-feed rss and potentially event data into facebook "walls" and "event pages"

Ultimately it would be great to have a functioning drupal "consensus decision making" module.

It appears at least one has been proposed:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/14775
http://drupal.org/node/316407

Any one have any knowledge of/experience with consensus process via drupal?

Thanks for your time and consideration, again any advice and direction would be greatly appreciated.

-Ben