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