If I could hit the pause button on this whole project and make any changes I wanted to it and its presentation, I would do this:

The TLDR before we get into the weeds of this is make the whole process more transparent, remove the Articles/Q&A Overlap, and create rewards/benefits for users who participate. This clears up what articles are for and gives a reason for Collectives to exist that isn't just another form of sponsored tags.

Collectives™ are spaces on where the community and the sponsoring company can collaborate to ask and answer questions on the tags tied to the collective.

1. Get rid of the "recognized member" designation, but leave "employee". "Employee" is mostly just flair, it doesn't give the user any additional ability in the Q&A portion of the site but it may give them more abilities within the collective itself such as suggesting/editing Articles or controlling/moderating other parts of the collective.
2. Leave the leaderboard, but make gold/silver/bronze rankings slightly broader and give users who attain those rankings curation privileges similar to gold badges.
3. Articles can't be voted on or earn rep; maybe implement the reactions feature here.
4. Revise the comments/feedback mechanism for Articles to be a three entry-point process: "This article was helpful 👍"/"This article wasn't helpful 👎"/(redflag)
5. Articles are for Announcements, Events, and Advertorials/Tutorials. No copy-pasting from elsewhere, everything must be tailored to this network.
6. Articles don't show up in the general Q&A search. Instead, they show up in the right panel when you are viewing collective pages and collective questions. Add the ability to subscribe to articles.
7. A roadmap that includes future features that add more ways for the sponsoring company and the community to interact. For example: a job board, chat integration, teams integration, outside RSS Feeds, and all of these things could be separate information blocks that appear any time someone visits a collective question/answer or page.
8. Remove "Recognized Answer". If it's a good answer people will upvote it; we shouldn't be using collectives as an alternative to the outdated answers project.

The goals would be to have a space where people can earn prestige (the leaderboard) while attaching real benefits to participating (additional moderation ability on those tags.) The sponsoring company will still get their space on SO, still be able to designate employees, and be able to directly communicate to the community through articles (and future features such as chat integration) without needing to make articles compete with Q&A for relevance.

If I could hit the pause button on this whole project and make any changes I wanted to it and its presentation, I would do this:

The TLDR before we get into the weeds of this is make the whole process more transparent, remove the Articles/Q&A Overlap, and create rewards/benefits for users who participate. This clears up what articles are for and gives a reason for Collectives to exist that isn't just another form of sponsored tags.

Collectives™ are spaces on where the community and the sponsoring company can collaborate to ask and answer questions on the tags tied to the collective.

1. Get rid of the "recognized member" designation, but leave "employee". "Employee" is mostly just flair, it doesn't give the user any additional ability in the Q&A portion of the site but it may give them more abilities within the collective itself such as suggesting/editing Articles or controlling/moderating other parts of the collective.
2. Leave the leaderboard, but make gold/silver/bronze rankings slightly broader and give users who attain those rankings curation privileges similar to gold badges.
3. Articles can't be voted on or earn rep; maybe implement the reactions feature here.
4. Revise the comments/feedback mechanism for Articles to be a three entry-point process: "This article was helpful 👍"/"This article wasn't helpful 👎"/(redflag)
5. Articles are for Announcements, Events, and Advertorials/Tutorials. No copy-pasting from elsewhere, everything must be tailored to this network.
6. Articles don't show up in the general Q&A search. Instead, they show up in the right panel when you are viewing collective pages and collective questions. Add the ability to subscribe to articles.
7. A roadmap that includes future features that add more ways for the sponsoring company and the community to interact. For example: a job board, chat integration, teams integration, outside RSS Feeds, and all of these things could be separate information blocks that appear any time someone visits a collective question/answer or page.
8. Remove "Recognized Answer". If it's a good answer people will upvote it; we shouldn't be using collectives as an alternative to the outdated answers project.

The goals would be to have a space where people can earn prestige (the leaderboard) while attaching real benefits to participation (additional moderation ability on those tags.) The sponsoring company will still get their space on SO, still be able to designate employees, and be able to directly communicate to the community through articles (and future features such as chat integration) without needing to make articles compete with Q&A for relevance.