I do think that more people need to be aware of two collaboration tools that Google has made available for free that can help with community or campaign organizing.  Many people have probably heard of Google Docs, but Google Spreadsheets also has a front end form input so that anyone can develop a webform to collect information from a community & have it organized in a nice, sortable spreadsheet. 

So I'm going to flesh out here an example that took me about 15 minutes to put together and doesn't require any technical experience to make.  It's an approach that can be used for all kinds of group situations. I first ran into the use of Google's spreadsheets as a means to collect information like this two years ago at a non-profit discussion in Washington, DC.

Simple Online Forms

Let's say I wanted to offer a session for people who want to learn more about the use of technology to campaign. For this I need to collect standard information (name, organization, email, phone).  Now you with every initiative, you might want to collect a slightly different set of information like say a preference of times for people to choose from.

By creating a spreadsheet & then making the corresponding form (which is a pretty automated process) you can provide a customized web page that you can send people to.