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JOURNEY - Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Weekend

The movement has been around nearly as long as the Internet itself. It's been called "civic networking," e-democracy," "virtual community building," and a bunch of other slightly pretentious names. But all the designations add up to essentially the same thing: the desire to use our rapidly-growing information infrastructure to help build up communications among real-world communities and neighborhoods. At one time, during the early '90s, civic networking was considered one of the most exciting applications of Internet technology.

Then the stock market discovered the Internet, and the Internet discovered e-commerce, and e-democracy moved to the back of the media-driven Internet Hype bus. But the movement has never gone away. In fact, it's safe to assume that feverish, commercially driven Internet development has brought many early utopian possibilities closer to reality. Or has it?

Are we really any closer to virtual communities? I spent a week on the civic networking vanguard in an effort to find out.

By D.C. Denison

D.C. Denison is manager of news and local content at Planet Direct, a personalized Web service.