i've been having an email discussion with Rob recently about the possibilites for the www.rawcommunities.com website. i am opening and continuing the discussion under this topic for involvement and participation with all!

The emails start after sending Rob an invite to the forum...

Rob says >
Thanks, that's a great idea. I'll put a link up from the
RawCommunities.com website.
I have thought about putting a forum on the Rawcommunities site and I just want to say that is still an option to keep everything together.
If it works being on tribes.net then great, it does look like and
interesting place with lots of raw connections. But if it doesn't get
many people joining, we could try moving it to RawCommunities.com

Rachan says>
thanks for emailing, and i'd really appreciate a link on your cool site!
halfway through sending out the invites to everyone today i saw that we shared the same "Raw Communities" title. so i then considered changing mine to "Raw Communities Collective" or something different anyway so as not to disturb your rightful claim to the name! i can always change it later if you want. But now that you mention the possibilty of moving the forum to your website in the future, well it might be a good sign of coincidence!
Perhaps as you say we can wait and see how things go with tribe.net first. One thing tribe.net has going for it is connectivity and exposure, here the raw community forum becomes a 'network within a network' of interest groups and individuals. it is might prove easy in amongst this diverse cyber-environ to deepen online relations with each other within tribe.net and become involved with each other's various interests outside of the "rawfood communities" setting. Something like this happening would assist the formation of strong and layered community relations important for living communities.
Do you have other ideas for your website you'd like to work on? There are many things that i know i would really like to do that the tribe.net forum won't do. Perhaps rawcommunities.com could leave off from develping forums, and instead provide those things that can't be otherwise done with the tribe.net forum. If you are interested we can discuss the thought further and work together in symbiosis.

Rob says>
Don't worry about the name, I'm not into trade marks or copyright kind of stuff! When we first opened rawcommunities.com someone else opened rawcommunity.com which I think had chat/forums but it doesn't seem to be around anymore.
We (Steve Charter actually owns the domain name and it is a joint
project but I seem to have taken over although Steve still pays the
domain reg) did (and maybe still do) have lots of plans for
rawcommunities.com but they seem to have gone by the wayside. It always happens when there is a distinct lack of interest in a site I put up, I sought of give up a bit. I mean, I've not even implemented the search or edit functions. I promise to do them soon.
I have started to put raw news up there, particularly UK stuff as it
seems to be a bit under-represented with all the US stuff going on.
More recently I've been working on www.funkyraw.com and a related print magazine which seem to be having a good success and a lot of hits to the website. I suppose in some ways this has taken over in that I was going to put some kind of "people connections" type of thing up on rawcommunities but now funkyaw.com has a personals section and a forum
Ok, I think that's enough rambling from me, but if you have any ideas I
would love to hear them, I'm definatly up for working together on stuff
- might motivate me a bit more.

Rachan says>
one important initial aspect in getting communities to work might be in conducting online surveys/questionaires/polls.
the gathering of information and feedback commentary from raw people out there can be quite useful towards assisting community understanding and developments. all sorts of basic questions can be asked for starters about the spectrum of who's out there, what are their interests, what would they like to have in a community, how serious they are about community living, what are their concerns. data can be both collected and reported in such a way that respects individual privacy, yet allows greater comprehension of groups as a whole. a generic survey may also be applied to a community to find out people's attractions and aversions to it. Such a collection and sharing of opinions amongst the raw community may be the start for stimulating a real understanding of what issues need to be addressed both specifically and as a whole.
Steve Charter from Eco-forest? i really like what the Eco-forest organisation is trying to do. it's a shame that their community, like alot of other communites, currently lacks in numbers of dedicated long-term members. This is one issue that hopefully we will be able to dissolve through the raw communities forum and its related activities.
Rob, funkyraw.com is a very nice website, and i like catchy thematics of the colourful little hippy-flowers all through it! i've read a little bit from books about designing websites but havent actually sat down and built one yet. Perhaps if you think some of the ideas we discuss motivate you enough, then we could hear your ideas for rawcommunities.com's overall design, if it comes to that, as well