Back in the days of Howard Dean, I spent many late nights with our own "Meetup" Michael Silberman building the tools we would use to organize and empower the leagues of Dean supporters at events in all 50 states and at hundreds of venues. It was a lesson in community building not easily forgotten, and I soon found myself anxiously looking for more opportunities in online/offline organizing. The one I found was both obvious and surprising all at once.

My apartment building is big. Really big. It's actually two buildings, with a combined 800 units between them. When I first moved to DC, I had never lived in a building large enough to warrant a laundry room, much less a gym, and I when I first moved here, I marveled at the density of urban living.

What I found to be so intriguing was that—despite our close proximity—I rarely spoke to anyone who lived around me. This wasn't intentional, but it turns out that with 12 floors, 3 tiers and 24 hours in a day, you just don't run into your neighbors all that often.

Suddenly, I had a fertile ground to experiment with the lessons I'd learned about online organizing and put some of EchoDitto's best practices to the test. With little to lose, I whipped together a Yahoo! Group, snapped up a domain name and slapped them together. But I had a problem: How do I build an online community of people I've never seen or spoken to? Thanks in part to the lessons learned on the Dean campaign, I came up with the most rudimentary of solutions.

I quickly printed up a stack of flyers with the Web address and ventured throughout the building posting them in every mail room, trash room and public space. I next turned to my fellow coworkers for help seeding the list, making fellow dittos Michael and Emily the first (and only?) non-resident members of my budding online community.

Then, I waited.

One by one, they came. A few in the first week, a few in the second, and after a few more flyerings I was at 30, then 40, then 50. Today the list stands at a respectable 70, and that doesn't include the second building—in which I have yet to post a single flyer.

Over the past two years, the list has featured a variety of lively discussions—ranging from how to hang pictures on the thick concrete walls to where to find a trustworthy housecleaner. Of course, we also see the occasional "stuff for sale" or complaints about the building or management.

In one amusing exchange entitled "Hall Screamers!!", one member writes about a particularly loud and enthusiastic couple's extracurriculars:

"We're on the 11th and are also getting fed up. We first thought
someone was getting murdered, but we are now gradually
wishing more and more it really was the case.."

Sure, from time to time we've dealt with the occasional spammer (such is the price of an open community), but by in large it's been self-moderating and generally neighborhood-appropriate discussion.

A number of free services have come and gone offering tools to organize residents online, but today a search by Google with keywords "apartment building online community" returned nothing tailored to this specific need. Perhaps this is because of the difficulty in building these communities, or—in the case of management sponsored online services—the desire to keep residents from publicly discussing things such as rent (or even worse, rat sightings!)

I think I'll stick with our little Yahoo! Group for now. For me, it has represented a great opportunity to bring the members of my residential community together, and ultimately created a lobbying power the management can't possibly ignore. (It wasn't long after I established the group that our leasing manager quietly subscribed.)

Recently, a new member suggested a happy hour for the members of the list. Perhaps the next evolution of this community won't be online, but offline where it began. Wouldn't that be something?