Consider this:

• My job is to focused around developing web applications that help communities collaborate yet the majority of the day to day collaborative work I am personally involved in is faciliated by standard mailman mailing lists, not community focused web applications. Mailing lists are functionaly no different than they were more than twenty years ago when they were invented.
• Without a doubt the most pervasive and powerful organizing tool the Dean campaign grassroots groups used beyond Meetup to self organize was Yahoo groups. Yahoo's business is centered around "user produced content" and community. YahooGroups (formerly eGroups) with 50M registered users is their #1 community tool. Yet the toolset has barely changed in the 6+ years since eGroups was bought and made a part of Yahoo.
• In my experience as a community organizer (DeanSpace, PeopleFinder) I have found that there are only two indespensable tools: wiki's and mailinglists. With both in place 85%+ of your web app needs are covered and groups are more than capable of self-organizing effectively.

So given all this, why does CivicSpace still not ship with working YahooGroups-like mailinglists and wiki support? Good freaking questions. Thankfully, I believe we are finally getting close to an adequate answer....

My first screecast (37 megs 10 min):

This sandbox runs on Drupal 4.7 beta 5. Modules I am using on this site:

• Og - to create and manage the groups. Thank you Moshe!
• og2list - to send out mail to group members
• og_forum - to sync a forum w/ each group
• og_mandatory_group (4.7 port included below) - to auto-join site registrants with the main group
• og_intro (in zip below) - to send notices to the main group when users join and new groups are formed
• Tabs - to draw the fancy ajax tabbed pages on the og nodes. Thanks nedjo!
• Node Relativity - to handle 'sub groups'
• Freelinking - to handle wiki-link -> node edit forms and [[wiki link]] fiters
• Masquerade - to let me test the site as a non-admin user
• Mailhandler - to post mail to my site off of og email lists (reads a catchall for the domain)
• Mail Stuffer (in zip below) - my hacky helper module that associates mail sent in to mailinglists
• Wikipage (in zip below)- to create wiki node types and manage permissions
• Bookmark - to let users save pages in their bookmarks block

I would highly recommend waiting until og2list is fully baked and until I have a chance to clean up my code before you use this. But if you must I have included all my new modules, slightly hacked modules (ported og2list to 4.7 and added tags support to mailhandler) and my theme .tpl files. This stuff will all make it into cvs some time next week if all goes well.