Graham has just noted a very good idea for combining communities of interest across different projects to share online portals. Noting that, with the online 'communities' built for small projects, the ...Problem is many of the so called communities have little to bind them together - other than that as individuals they have all joined an on-line community. But they do not 'know' each other - neither do they usually work together on a collective task..., he goes on to suggest an interesting new approach:

The answer - I think - is to encourage clusters of projects to share common community portals. These clusters which obviously need some areas of commonality in their work - could then focus the public areas on the services and tools their projects are producing - whilst economies of scale should allow the deployment of reasonably sophisticated communication environments for project development.

I've noticed, since we started see trackbacked comments and knotes weblogs in the NGRF site, that the potential for a sense of wider, cross-site community is large when two-way linking (trackback) allows discussion and commentary to span multiple sites. This will be very interesting to explore!

In other words, though each project may have its own online presence, the people participating in the project may participate actively in several other online activities; two-way linking can give a real sense of emergent communities which span several projects while growing the core content and activities within each project's site. I reckon both approaches are worth investigating, and that some combination of combined, multi-project portals, and multi-portal emergent communities will evolve.