However, the role of the virtual assistant is not yet clear to me.

I don't really have a clear picture, yet, either. It occurs to me now that Steemit already beat me to this idea with SC03-SC09, steem greeters, cryptoacademy professors, and country representatives, though. They've been making use of virtual assistants for a couple of years, already. I just didn't have a name for it. ;-) An example of what I had in mind is like this:

Say that the team agrees on a project to update the documentation for the Steemit API. That's too big of a job for anyone to undertake with hopes of relying on upvotes (we saw how that went with @the-gorilla and his front end effort). On the other hand, though, we could try to break things down into small self-contained, manageable tasks. i.e. ask "virtual assistants" to submit pull requests and post their progress, one API call at a time, and support that with upvotes. If someone abandons the effort, the upvote is not wasted, because the task was identified as a strategic need and it stood, independently, on its own.

Two other discussion points, for longer term consideration:

• Could we scale up participation and effectiveness by organizing into teams (circles) under a decentralized model like holacracy or sociocracy?
• Is it possible to create a community moderation account and (provably) permanently disable all keys except the posting key? If so, this could be a tool for building a community "war-chest" for distributing upvotes without worrying about someone powering down and disappearing.