Hivemind Communities do an awesome job at bringing organizational structure to our experience on Steem. To build upon this, I've been thinking about Conversational Structure lately.

In the way that Communities give us tools to organize ourselves by leveraging:

• Steem accounts
• Account ownership (and therefore rights)
• Roles

We can create tools to cater to different conversation types by leveraging:

• Post (or comment as it actually is on the blockchain)
• Authorship of above
• Community association

By using the Post as a building block for various conversation types, we can create new ways to converse on Steem.

Not all discussions require a blog-comment experience or interaction style. Some require realtime, chronologically ordered messaging, and some need to capture the quantitative distribution of opinions.

A few ideas:

Polls

Polls could be implemented as a post type. Each community could have a Polls section and they may even be used to vote on actions concerning that community.

• New Post creates the poll, with details (poll text, poll type, etc)
• custom_json ops can be used to capture choices or comments
• Permissions can be configurable, as in anyone can create one or maybe someone with a particular role (further research needed)

Discussion rooms

Each community could have a discussion room, with a "rolling thread" type of experience. Like a Telegram group, with messages ordered chronologically. These can be useful when community members need to discuss something in realtime and reach consensus quickly. It's also easier to keep up with discussions, than when they are on multiple comments on a blog post for example.

We could use:

• Main Discussion Room (a standard discussion post for general discussions for that community), e.g. A new Post with permlink main-discussion
• Sub-discussions created impromptu. e.g. as new Posts following a protocol permlink scheme, e.g. discuss-blabla
• Members can write messages in the "Discussion Room" as comments with parent_permlink or custom_json ops (further research needed, blockchain resource usage vs votability)

So... let's talk :) Pros, cons?? What do you think?