Big news, amigas and amigos: at the end of this year, I’ll be leaving NOW Communications after eight years as their Director of New Media.

And I’ll be joining Alexandra Samuel full-time in our consulting practice, newly relaunched as Social Signal.

Social Signal’s focus is on unlocking the web’s potential for community collaboration. Using tools like blogs, RSS and tagging, we help people create online community ecosystems — networks of sites, each with its own unique identity and community, but all sharing content and users to work more effectively together. This helps organizations to engage their members, while working with other organizations to achieve common goals.

Social Signal marries (and I use that term advisedly) my skills in progressive advocacy, web development and strategic leadership communications with Alex’s experience and extensive research in online community and public participation. Alex is already applying her expertise on tagging and RSS to several projects, including Net² — an online community and conference focusing on the future of the non-profit web. As Alex puts it,

Tech memes like blogging, tagging and RSS — sometimes described as “Web 2.0″ technologies — allow individual non-profits, community organizations and campaigns to work together effectively, while still maintaining their individual identities. Each organization has its own web site and/or blog, but shares content with other like-minded organizations by using RSS to move news, stories and information from one site to the other; tagging provides a way of structuring this information into particular topics.

Of course for progressive movements, with their emphasis on collective action, community can be everything. And Alex’s work has led me to think about how community engagement can serve the organizational and communications needs of progressive movements. I’m also excited by the ways that online communications — particularly blogging — can complement and even amplify traditional leadership communications vehicles (like speeches), to deliver messages, motivate activists and mobilize supporters.

Usually, individual voice and community vision are portrayed as antagonists. But I’m coming to see their relationship less as a tension and more as a recipe for mutual reinforcement … and online ecosystems as a well-equipped kitchen.

Social Signal is a chance to extend and deepen my work in making the web serve a vision of social change. I’ve been fascinated by the potential for online communications to transform civil society since the first time I logged into a BBS, more than 20 years ago. Now, at last, I get to push the limits of that potential.