I think we are on the same page and just have different expectations of the private/public split.
I’m all for using Discourse for everything public — with the important caveat that access control is much better integrated with our existing Google setup. There are some documents (financial planning, contact lists, …) and concerns (social issues, gender escalations, team tech, …) which most of us aren’t ready to share with the wider public.
Let me illustrate:
- We write a document on Google Docs with an official project proposal, say for something like a local OTSconf, which is kind of confidential because it contains contact addresses and financial details. We want to share it with the whole local team, say Dortmund.
- With Google Groups: You can just share the document with team.dortmund@ and everyone — people who are currently in the group, and those who join in later, maybe to help out with the endeavour — will automatically have access.
- With Discourse: You can explicitly invite people to the document. Whenever someone joins the team (something which already puts strain on our limited team.tech@) they will have to inquire with the original author of the document to invite them, too.
I agree it’s a narrow use case but it has repeatedly come up in the past. I think these use cases are best covered by Google Groups, while everything else should go into Discourse.