Here is a great link that delineates the organizational nature of communities that come together for practice.

Something to keep in mind, and something for us to consider while starting to form loosely connected - to eventually more deeply connected - communities of interest around Integral Practice.

For the most part, the Stage of Development for Integral Practice is Potential, and Coalescing.

There are some significant difficulties right now for forming communities of practice however:

1. Significant overlap with similar entities.  There are already several spiritual and health organizations that do similar things.  Is Integral simply a larger mental superstructure, that actually contributes nothing unique, in the way of skillful means?
2. Diffusion of goals - is it personal practice?  Spiritual growth?  What methods?  Is everything allowed?  What is the container of practices that everyone can coalesce around?
3. Responsibilites of the core community - do these exist?  Is there buy-in? 
4. Inspirational leadership leading to a collective action plan.  There is a large gap here for the Integral Community.  After reading one of Ken books, you are fired up, ready to go and "be integral", and then...um...well, I guess I can start meditating?

These begin to be answered by the Integral Life Practice kit.  These are practices that people can begin to coalesce around.  But there is a lot of refinement work to be done here.

Really, what integral can contribute is the following:

a. Agency of discernment - THIS practice - of the hundreds of practices out there, is reliable. 
b. Exercises and research into cross-training - combining THIS daily exercise with THIS daily exercise - gives cumulative beneficial effects.

For myself, this is about joining with others:

a. meditation
b. advaita
c. skillful means for body, mind, community.

I'm working on the details, but this will revolve around -

up to 8 people
Weekly conference call
Stating commitments to integral practice, for the week, on phone and by spreadsheet list
Buddy support - commited to frequent conversations (email, phone, IM) with buddy around own keeping practice commitments. (Group will need to be 6 or 8)
Assessment of "progress" - both in initial intake, and then group assessments.

I have the use of a few cool web tools to do this process.  And luckily, this won't take a lot of work to setup, as the tools are pre-existing (God bless Web 2.0)  But the long and short of it is to:

a.  Make your integral commitments and intentions available to a small, dedicated group.  This in itself has more effectiveness than we give credit for.
b. Create a history and trust with this small group, to take advantage of the power of a small group.
c. Track progress over time.

Please send me an email if you are interested in this.  I think this will be highly useful to people out in the boonies, but we will see.  

This is an experiment in web 2.0 support groups.

I would love for you to join the experiment!

Sean at Deep Surface points out that Integral Portland is expanding their website, and making it more and more of a portal.  It looks very nice, so take a look!

Here is the link.