If you want to create a list of recommended documents you could look at using the featured content widget which can be configured per node. You'd simply add the featured content widget to the template, and then each node admin could edit the list and control their own list of recommended documents.
We had a similar idea for the HTML widget, right now we only support static HTML widgets, but we have a concept where you could place an empty html widget on the template and allow each group owner / node owner to edit the HTML themselves. They couldn't change the template or where the widget appears but they could have control to edit the text for group specific announcements, etc. This could kind of be done today using node specific page templates but that would be burdonsome to do for each and every place, which is why this dynamic html widget idea was introduced.
The featured content and places widget works this way today. We still need to develop the dynamic HTML option.
