I think there have got to be things you can do by online communication alone, as and when you can, and I am personally very interested in finding/building systems that allow people to do so.

I'm thinking:
* helping moderate a community
* organising a community to-do list, and a resource list
* researching existing organisations and models that work well for distributed online contributers (e.g. DW contributers?)
* working up to the kind of things mentioned by davidgillon: research and analysis and written communications

I sort of want a system where people can come and see a list of things they can do, with an estimate of task size, and pick something up and do it. But one of the things to do is keeping that list / estimate up to date, and breaking down tasks into small chunks that can be done ...