I'm starting Build Civitas so that more people can start free online communities. All sort of online communities. It's intended to be a conservatory of communities from newsletters to forums to blog comments to private groups. Every one of these patterns of community require specific feature, but also stand to benefit from careful tuning and improvements. Discourse is the open source platform that powers Build Civitas. It's remarkably flexible, but also can be tricky to use if you don't know what you are doing. My plan is to build a standard configurations for group owners so that they can focus on building a community and not fiddling with the software. Communities on Build Civitas are owned by the group. I mean they are responsible for their own moderation and governance. They also are free to move to another platform. If it's Discourse, I can even help with the move. For the moment communities don't cost anything. I'm already paying server costs, so it's not a huge issue. At some point I may set up a subscription model for groups to pay for themselves. But there will always be a free option for groups that don't consume much in the way of resources.