Much of my work involves research and development work into on-line communities. Another chuck of work is research and development in education - mostly undertaken through European funded projects, typically involving parters from five to eight countries and lasting two to three years.

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.

The projects do meet together - usually two or three times a year and do have a series of collective work tasks. The projects also are more or less expected to maintain a web site which may or may not include group-ware tools, bulletin boards etc. The problem is that the project are frequently too small to develop any real community.

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.

Seems a win win situation to me. I am going to try to get two projects I work with to develop this idea. The first is the Self evaluation project for which I have just launched a new web site. The second is the new Leonardo da Vinci ICOVET project which is looking at the assessment of non formal learning for socially disadvantaged young people.