"CivicSpace is a free open-source software platform for grassroots organizing and civic activity. It allows individuals and organizations to build online communities that communicate effectively, act collectively, and coordinate coherently with a network of other related organizations and communities."

 CivicSpace has built it's software on top of Drupal, which is an open source content management platform with very well developed categorization abilities and a broad array of modules available to enhance core services. What CivicSpace does is take that core framework and enhance it with some specific capabilites for grassroots organizing. By extending Drupal with a specific class of features the developers have provided an "out of the box" solution for grassroots organizations to deploy a useful and usable site within an hour or so.

Having said that....it helps to have a tech/web person and access to your server. Being a web person with open access to my servers , I cannot give any mileage variances for hosted installs of CivicSpace.  I do know that for me to fire up a new install of CivicSpace requires minimal time and effort with pretty immediate rewards.

CivicSpace incorporates blogging,forums, file storage,pools and surveys and a number of other features to spark the process of community egagement online. 

My first install of CivicSpace goes back a while and I've watched and upgraded over time, always with a positive improvement in features and stability. That, combined with the highly developed categorization tools build into the Drupal core, encourages me to believe that this software can facilitate online community building and sustain development both on and offline.