Plugin Idea: Member Hierarchy

In a number of the organizations I’m working for, I want to be able to make certain members accountable to each other in hierarchies. For example:

Church Members accountable to/administrated by a Church Leader.
Volunteers accountable to/administrated by a Volunteer Group Leader.

Ideally, I’d like to have the following setup:
– Anyone can register on the site, but they can’t do anything yet; they’re just subscribers.
– They then make a “membership request” to a leader/supervisor user who they know in real life. (instead of to the site admin).
– That leader can accept their request, granting them capabilities up to one user-role beneath the leader’s own role (i.e. editors can promote people to be authors or contributors).
– Their status as a member who is accountable to that specific leader is maintained. That leader, but no other leaders, (other than admins) can ban and un-ban them.
– Members can be transferred between leaders, either by the leaders themselves or by site admins, for example, at leader-account deletion.

Essentially, A member is to a leader as a post/page is to an author.

Of course, in an alternate way of doing things it could be cool to have infinite layers of hierarchy, for very large organizations. (of course, you wouldn’t use the rule of “you can only promote to one rank beneath you”. Infinite hierarchy would kind of disrupt the member->leader // post->author analagy.

It could also be cool if leaders could view an aggregated activity stream of all the members that are accountable to them, to make “policing” easier, but that’s obviously not a mission-critical feature.

The purpose of this functionality for me would be to give the site’s community more structure, and give everyone extra incentive to play nice, while allowing more organic growth of membership. I work mostly with churches and international volunteer orgs; with churches, they really don’t want swearing and foul play, and with volunteer orgs, lives can be on the line if people screw around. So I’m looking for a way to make members more accountable to their real-life superiors.

You can probably tell that I’m a buddypress user, but I realized that user-hierarchy isn’t buddypress-specific, so I posted it here when nobody talked to me over in BP land 🙁

Perhaps this kind of plugin already exists somewhere? Or perhaps some epic person would be willing to take it on as a project?

All thoughts are appreciated. Thanks,