**Crickets**: You send a message and no one responds. Work on a culture of responding and acknowledging peoples' effort to communicate.
Deferred responsibility: Someone asks people to step up, but no one does. Try techniques such as go-arounds and active facilitation.
Emotional communication fails: Someone sends a message, and it seems to have a very negative tone. Have active conversations as a group about emotional communication online, and resolve emotionally difficult issues in person.
Too many channels: You send a message on email, respond in person, discuss further in Loomio, then vote in Doodle... ack! Use active facilitation to round up different channels, and develop policy for how and when to switch.
Inaccessibility: A few tech-savvy members of the group love a new tool, but it excludes some other members. Always train every member on a tool before using it for official business.
Security: Online (or over the phone) means the feds can read it, now and forever, period. Never discuss anything legally sensitive online. Don't let this prevent you from making effective use of online tools!
Best practices
Use active facilitation.
Develop policy for how you make decisions online.
Train every member of the group with a new tool before using it for
official business. Pay attention to dynamics of who participates and
who doesn't.
Favor open source, community driven tools (Loomio, InterTwinkles,
Etherpad) over closed/commercial alternatives (Doodle, Google Docs)
when you have a choice. You don't always have a choice.