We (a community arts organisation) want to create a company totally accessible online by its members.
We want them to be able to buy shares or otherwise sign up online (with payment via PayPal or suchlike), to view all company reports and finances (hopefully as we work on them, not just 'published' finished material), to have things mailed as appropriate to a nominated address, and to vote on resolutions (in this case created by a public meeting). This is because as a community organisation we want everything we do to be accessible - without, that is, trolls, haxmaniax, spammers and other troublemakers being able to mess it up (meaning: some security, some backup, some changes tracking).
It's not much more than a tailored database-driven site with some security, I'd have thought.
It doesn't need to be complicated, in fact, the simpler the front end and the publisher end are, the more accessible it is and the more it's doing what we want.
We reckon someone somewhere must have written this already.
You guys might be the ones who know who and where...

ta
moonson

A community-oriented content management system like Drupal or Joomla! would have the functionality you would need to put together a site like this. Both Drupal and Joomla! have Paypal and other payment and subscription modules available. You could use subscriptions and some lightweight permissions to manage who can have access to read and/or edit certain content. These projects also have extensions that would allow you to setup newsletters and polling or voting.