If building an online community is the goal then at the time of writing it is hard to go past email mailing lists as the tool of choice for the following reasons:

• because they use email as the transport mechanism they are reliable, inexpensive and widely available.

• in this changing world of work, adoption of telecommunications and Internet technologies varies widely. However, email is a natural part of working for many people.

• the nature of email means that once subscribed to a list, the information is delivered without special effort on the user's part. This is not true of web based facilities. This "fly past" and "in your face" feature emulates a learning community environment more closely than having to go to a web address which more closely resembles attending a meeting.

• material is delivered in chronological order. This means that participants can construct their own meaning and build stories from the interaction that occurs.

• the availability of good software for archiving list traffic with search and browse options makes the history of the community automatically available.

• if the community is widely dispersed geographically they are more likely to have varying access to specific software and their own expertise will also vary.

There are many tools and combinations of tools that can be used to build an online community. The success of an online community does not necssarily depend on the particular technology used but email based discussion lists (also called mailing lists, and often referred to as listservs or listservers) can work well for groups who have varying levels of sophistication in available hardware, software and skills.