I’ve written this specifically to welcome our Steering Committee members (and I love that a forum invite can land on a specific topic 
) - so welcome indeed! 
Right now, the forum is private while we do final testing, so you won’t be able to invite new people yet. We’re aware that a forum is of limited use without it being available to the whole community, so this phase won’t last long.
We’ve talked before about how to structure the forum, and I hope what you’ll find is what you expect. If you haven’t already seen the voting process video (see below) I made, that could be worth looking at. I’d also check out the forum-tips tag for some more detail and ideas.
The Sandbox category (right here) has pretty much all the plugins enabled - events, topic voting, solved issues, etc - so please try things out, and we’ll clean it up before we go live. You’ll also get the standard Discourse walkthrough from @discobot too, it’s worth trying out. I’ve set you all to Trust Level 2 (see this post for an explanation of trust levels).
The SC also has a Group which be tagged using @ (like this @SteeringCommittee), and that comes with a message inbox - you can use this for private SC communication. Just be aware that us admins can read the messages (but only if we go looking - it’s like being the admin of a mailserver). The group is configured so that the rest of the forum can see it and @-mention it, but not send private messages to it (only members and staff can do that). Please try it out!
Any questions, please post in Forum Guide & Feedback or Sandbox (I should notice, but you can tag me for extra effect), or PM me directly if you wish. I’ll be quite responsive for the next few weeks, I think 
. It only happens when people are testing, because the rest of the time you have more than 20 characters of things to say 
button if you just want to add a +1 
)