Examples of using online tools for community building
Tips, Tools, Strategies, and Technology
http://www.nextdoor.com -- I've been using this with our neighborhood, and it's a good basic tool for communication, but it falls short of promoting ABCD in so many ways. The best part is the neighbor residence validation component, which ensures that only those people who live in your neighborhood can join the group. But then a huge part of the site is for 'recommendations' of services, and yet there is no way to build associations of people within the neighborhood. They provide a directory of registered neighbors and their various interests/gifts, but no way to search or index their gifts or associations.
http://sites.google.com -- I've built our neighborhood's public website using this, at http://www.rosetrails.org. (Ok, so far it's better described as a 'prototype' at this stage.)It's super easy to edit and allow other people to contribute to either the whole site or a specific set of pages.
http://groups.google.com -- I created a Google Group for neighbors on my block for email-based discussions, and our list includes about 18 of the 36 households so far. It's great for communicating events, discussing suspicious behavior, etc...and I look forward to using it to help me in applying ABCD within our neighborhood.