How to develop a community feature in the dashboard for multiauthor site

Question

I run a Wordpress site that has more than 300 authors. Is it possible to create some type of community in the backend (dashboard)? Ideally, a space where the authors can discuss with each other in a thread type of system, with admin news and so on. The closest thing I could find was the Admin Microblog but by reading the description, it appears very limited.

I am quite surprised that there is not much backend community type of plugins, I would have imagined that the demand for such would be rather high. Anyone knows?