I thought it might be a good idea, while @waugh is hard at work getting our new forum up with lots of help from Jay Cincotta, to start a discussion of some of the things we’d like to see, especially things that should probably be there from the start. Categories is an important one. I think categories are underutilized in the current forum.
Here are my off-the-top-of-my-head suggestions as to what the categories might be. I’d encourage others to suggest their own ideas. I don’t know who will make the final decision (other than knowing that it isn’t me!) but hopefully if anyone has thoughts or ideas on it, they can express them here rather than wait till they are written in stone by the powers that be. 
There is of course going to be some overlap, and things that seem to belong in one category will obviously come up within topics in a different category. No big deal.
Voting methods:
where we discuss different methods, propose new ones, and debate their merits
Pure theory:
where we can discuss things like game theoretical foundations, utilitarian vs immunity to strategy, etc. It’s ok to stray from voting systems per se, as long as it has at least some relevance
Dev:
where we can talk about development of tools that we can share. CodePens are my own current big emphasis because of how they enable frictionless collaborating and sharing. Eventually we would hopefully move on to developing plugins for our own forum, and then sharing those with the wider internet. I have tons of ideas for this but I’ll save them for the new forum. While this category might mostly attract coders, we’d encourage non-coders to come in and offer ideas, suggest improvements, etc.
Education:
where we can post topics intended to be educational to newcomers to the field, or otherwise useful as foundational material. These might eventually lead to making static pages we can have hosted on the votingtheory domain, but it makes sense to discuss them here first.
Advocacy and outreach:
This can include such things as posting links to relevant topics elsewhere on the web (Reddit, Quora, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc) where members of our community may want to weigh in. This can help us grow our own community as well as just having a wider influence on public thought on better ways of voting.
Meta:
where we can talk about the forum itself, including suggesting ideas for new features, discussing how it can be moderated, discussing how we can keep things on topic while still encouraging ongoing discussion. This being a prime example of a “meta post”!
Cat pictures:
j/k dogs rule.
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My hope is that most of the important decisions with the new forum will be discussed here, in the open. The committee or council or whatever obviously has a purpose, but there are a ton of things that can be discussed within the forum itself, with everyone welcome to weigh in (regardless of what time zone they are in, etc).
