Implementing Area 51 with Acquia Commons? I'm probably going to use Acquia Commons to put together a site for communities, and I understand that it's set up as installed to have administrators create the groups and subgroups. However, I'd like users to be able to petition for new groups (and subgroups?) to be created in a process something like Stack Exchange's own Area 51, though perhaps without the following phase.

How would I go about implementing that sort of thing on the current release of Commons? It's based on Drupal 6 until more modules are ported to D7.
Here's a simple solution:


Create a content type, say 'proposal', that any user can add for the petition group (with title as group name and body for reason). 
Users can comment on nodes of that type so they can discuss the proposal.
Create a view to show nodes of type 'propsal' and enable filtering, sorting etc.
Use the Votingapi module and one of the voting widgets (like vote up/down) to allow people to vote on the node.


For the creation of the groups, you can either:


Do it manually, monitoring when a proposal gets a specified number of votes. 
Use the Rules module to do it automatically.