This technology better met the NPR goals than chatrooms or list-serves, but it put more emphasis on the meeting as interactive knowledge building than the NPR team originally planned and had less regard for the meeting as community activation. Its deployment was shaped by our recognition of the major challenges that a large on-line meeting presented to the system's potential for organizing texts and building knowledge: Managing the fan-in of comments on the proposals, structuring the interactions of participants and maintaining civility among them.