In my opinion, we should probably try to keep this more local.
My idea was ultimately to offer hosting to different home-brew clubs in canada; provide them with a forum and access to the other features we bring together. The benefit being that it would put all the homebrew clubs in one place, so inter-club discussion, competitions etc would be much easier to facilitate.
You mean inviting other clubs to post here?
Yes absolutely, but each club being given their own top-level forum (note how Fredericton Craft Brewing Association is an enclosed set). Each club can be given autonomy over the forums it owns, and there could be a number of inter-club forums for non-local discussion.
We should not try to compete with HBT.
Yes and no. Certainly we shouldn't try to fragment their user base, but I feel the quality of their offering is something to aspire to on any level -- local up to international. It would be my hope that we could be complementary to HBT, providing a service for individual clubs to communicate; both intra- and inter-club. There is no concept of clubs on HBT that I am aware of...
Is there a financial cost (or benefit) to having lots of other groups be under the craftbrewing.ca umbrella
It depends on how it were managed, but not significantly. If traffic ever reached a significant level we would need to have a discussion regarding advertising versus donations for hosting costs. Right now it's negligible as it's piggy-backing on servers I already have.
There are functional benefits; such as competitions, knowing where good homebrew can be found before you get to a place, and establishing a network of clubs, rather than the scattered base of individuals that constitutes HBT.
Would we lose autonomy?
Absolutely not; and that would be the main underlying concept. Each club would have its own autonomy within the site, having the power to moderate its forums + users as they see fit.
Your concerns regarding autonomy are I suspect the biggest ones to overcome if we would be to host further clubs on this site.
I'm not looking to force anything here, so this discussion needs to continue until we reach some kind of democratic conclusion.