The support department has successfully moved into a shiny office on a public etherpad.
We don't share the link on the forum to keep out trolls and vandals, but everyone interested can get it privately.
When we tried this for the cXo team there wasn't happening a lot, so we switched to slack. It offers similar features, but with shinier looks and the possibility to make different posts for different topics. The downside is that you need to have an account and be invited to have a look at what's happening.
For me, the most important reason to use a tool like this is the chat with backlog, where quick ideas can be mentioned, discussed and discarded in no time. Plus, being in a chat room together is a great thing for team-building.
Of course it's important to keep the community up-to-date with what's going on. My approach is updating the candidate-thread every few days. I prefer this over opening multiple threads, because everyone who is interested in what we're doing knows there's one place to look, and new voters get an immediate overview about what happened in the past and what's going on at the moment.