Some specific things that we can see from other communities that have worked, having specific goals and tasks for users.

Pat went to the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference and was completely over the moon about how they use their wiki and the web page in general because there were things like, people could us the wiki to say "Oh, this is what we want to talk about" and sort of steer the direction of the conference and the community in general. People could use the wiki to network with each other and to say "Oh hey, we're thinking about going to dinner, who wants to join us?" So, interestingly in this case, the wiki itself was of course a resource and it supported the face to face interactions and that seems like a really useful way to build community both online and of course face to face.

Using synchronous interactions, the National Girl's Collaborative Project has Webcasts that they put up, and this is a great example of the successful use of both synchronous and asynchronous interactions. That is, it's a synchronous interaction when the Webcast is happening. But then it's up after the fact and so, if I wasn't able to make it, I can still see what happened, I can still sort of link into it and feel like I'm part of the community and didn't get left out.

And then of course, building off an existing group, Cambridge Community Television here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a community access television station that has been very successful in creating communities on their web page building off of the television aspect of things. So, not only are they using an existing group, but they're also using multimedia interactions as a way of drawing different people in to talk about similar topics.