The purpose of Community Forum was to discuss “How communities real and virtual are changing through media,” and asked “What are the new ways for people to use information, news and journalism to imaging their collective possibilities as communities, and to set and reach common community goals?”

Panel participants discussed various ways in which communities are being created online.

Shel Israel – "Naked Conversations" author 

Israel is writing a book called "Global Neighborhoods" which explores online communities. He talked about how the communities being created on the Internet are not virtual as some would imagine, but real: real people are being connected with others around the world, in ways never before imaginable that defy all geographic boundaries. They are creating lasting freindships and most of the communities are composed of young people. What happens when they grow up and replace the Boomer generation?

Ian Rowe, MTV   

Rowe said that online communities are a "threshold" opportunity of which young people are taking advantage. Young people want things when they want it, how they want it when it comes to media and the same thing relates to their everyday life. MTV is a traditionally top-down organization, "but now the audience is telling us, 'it’s great that you’re focues on this issue, but I’ve got something important to me and I want ot be able to connect to young people all over the world that may have similar concerns.' Young peopole tend to do what’s rewarded in society – our hope is to celebrate them taking action."

Rich Skrenta, Topix.net 

The Internet is the first real two-way means of media the world has ever seen. Newspapers, television, and radio all require enormous amounts of investment and talks down to people, decides what they need to know. Online, there are millions of small communities being formed, from subjects that interests millions of people to those that only attract one hundred. The conversations are intriguing, but a few bad apples can ruin the whole thing, so we need "robust technical systems and social architecture to keep the conversation from being derailed. Topix has been working with newspapers and has freaked out some editors. For example, Topix has helped enable comments for newspapers and when they get a quarter of a million comments in 6 months, the editors don't know what to do. But they would not have had that feedback without this technology.

Jan Schaffer, J-Lab 

Pulitzer Prize winner from the Philly Inquirer, Schaffer is looking at journalism from the bottom-up point of view. She is studying news that is community based and has realized that lots of local citizen journalism sites are not exactly acts of journalism, but acts of community building. This is outside of the comofrt zone of traditional journalists. Most of these local initiatives don't make money nor receive a lot of readership but 75% of them consider themselves successful because they define success as serving their community - they are causing community conversations to happen. They are not finishing stories the way a traditional journalist would, but are making people think and take part.

Lisa Stone, BlogHer 

BlogHer focuses on women building communities. It consists of almost 2,000 blogs and has a team of 60 editors that cover numerous subjects. It is an example of how specific groups of people can come together online in ways they couldn't before. "Finally, women have the tools that they need to talk about what they care about."