Karl Marx, Stewart Brand, Adam Smith, Vannevar Bush, Ayn Rand—all these people instigated incredibly powerful communities of action, and each community centered around some small set of published works. These works create common knowledge of both a set of ideas and also a shared goal. They also become iconic, a symbol to denote membership in group.
In present day, Less Wrong, Marginal Revolution, Paul Graham, and Slate Star Codex have convened vibrant communities around their writing. Those communities aren’t just talking, they’re acting. They’re not even always acting in coordination with each other: many Less Wrong readers simply went about their lives separately, behaving quite differently as a result. In some sense, this is what Stripe Press aspires to.
On the other hand, it seems quite difficult to convene a community of action out of whole cloth, without some concrete shared object to rally around.
This all suggests that if one wants to create effective communities of action—say, as part of an Enabling environment—a good strategy is to create iconic media artifacts.