This is somewhat of a tangent, but I was just re-reading this post on the mayfirst.org blog about experiences helping to build the US Social Forum website/online community this past summer.

http://mayfirst.org/node/471

Interesting tidbit:

Most technology teams are formed with the best intentions: either technologists wanting to band together and support the organizing effort or non-technology organizers recognizing the value of technology and moving to create a space for that work to be done. The effect, however, is the same: all other organizing efforts become divorced from technology. ... Forming technology teams is akin to forming an "organizing" team rather than recognizing that every team is an organizing team.

Most of the blog is about the mechanics of organizing an effective and democratic technology strategy for a collective organization, but since we've ventured into mechanics here I thought some of it might be relevant.

As for discussion fora: I think they're the black holes of the Internet. I haven't seen a robust "forum" since the days of widespread newsgroup use. What I primarily see today are community blogs that encourage commenting -- each person is given the power to speak to everyone else, and everyone else can also speak to them.

Until nonprofits are able to allocate sufficient resources to participate in these kinds of conversations, I don't think there will be much public back-and-forth. (That Amnesty, a big organization, isn't doing it effectively doesn't disprove my belief that small organizations can't do it effectively, as far as I can tell.)

In our experience, most of the conversation happens behind the scenes but ends up being more "actionable" -- activists send us a message on MySpace to get information or ask for help, and then use their own knowledge and network of friends to use the information effectively. It's not a public discussion, but it's definitely a conversation.

To be honest I don't know how a national campaign could ever have real, genuine conversations with tens of thousands of people across the country. I think the more useful function is connecting people to each other, empowering them with information and allowing them to have conversations among themselves and within their (offline) communities.