We have formed a bunch of teams, including one for Science Improvement, Catastrophism, Mechanistic Science, Electric Universe, Aether, Miles Mathis, Paranormal Psychology, and Planetary Science. Each team has its own homepage, where the members can describe the nature of what they're studying, and assemble links to relevant material, on QDL and elsewhere. There is dedicated functionality for posting articles, participating in forum discussions, instant messaging, private messaging, filling out questionnaires, and adding events to team calendars. All of this is in a rich text environment (i.e., WYSIWYG editing), so the limitations of bb-code aren't there. And the rights can be controlled on all items, so people can post private, workgroup, and public material. All in all, I don't know of a more feature rich venue for online collaboration. There certainly aren't any free ones.

Most importantly, we're striving to get past the main roadblock to progress — these forums are just huge time-sucks, if all we do is say the same thing over and over, and if legitimate points always get buried under subsequent posts, on or off topic. So we're developing the protocols so that teams are always building on what they've already accomplished. For example, after a chat session, one of the team members will boil down the discussion to a summary, and add action items to a list of them. Then, the prerequisite for participating in the next chat is that you've read the summary of the previous one, or at the very least, you've gone over the action items.