BuddyPress.org

Hi, I am involved in the Return To Work Community. That is, the part of the workers compensation world that is focused on helping ill or injured workers to return to activity and work. This community includes employers, medical and rehabilitation professionals, and a host of others. The two fundamental motives for communication between people in this field are, that worklessness is bad for your health (the equivalent of smoking 200 cigs a day one expert says), and second the current compensation systems don’t work very well (people with like injuries who are outside the systems recover more quickly and have better health outcomes than those inside the systems).
In recent years my group has built a number of sites to help improve knowledge and practice in the field e.g. http://www.rtwknowledge.org
We now wish to build a site that is solely devoted to providing free communication services to individuals and groups (mainly non-profits) in the field. A site that will enable people to communicate:
individually and/or
collectively, in groups
publicly
privately
locally
nationally
globally
This site is needed so that practitioners who are working face to face in the field can get together and fix the probs with the systems, which are designed (in part) to separate and control.
As far as I can see (I’m not a programmer) what we need requires a combination blogs/forum structure in which individuals can communicate one to one, some content public, some private (particularly for groups).
Is BuddyPress the right foundation on which to create this site?
We have backing to build this thing, a designer has begun work and will devote full time attention to it for 3 months from end of August and we will appoint a programmer around the same time.
I am developing the brief now, your advice will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance