I'm a firm believer that little things mean a lot in building community. Small talk, for instance, is a big deal -- it's how we establish the ground rules for interpersonal communications, and it opens the door to bigger and deeper conversations.
There's a great list of 150 things you can do to build social capital at BetterTogether.org. I passed it around to participants at the API's small-market online strategy seminar last week.
Many are very small things: Call an old friend. Offer to rake a neighbor's yard. Share your snow blower (not something we think about in the South). Sit on your stoop. Say hello to strangers.
I bring this up because I believe a decline in local community connections is one of the major factors undermining local newspapers in the United States. We're all spending too much time watching reality television and not enough time dealing with the reality in our own backyards.
Much of the work we're doing in Bluffton and Savannah and other community-interaction projects at Morris is specifically targeted at this concept: building social capital by getting people talking about local life. That starts with the small, the personal, the "inconsequential" and it quickly builds into significant civic discourse.
Other resources: The Saguaro Seminar and Robert Putnam's website, BowlingAlone.com.