A recent article, Lessons from the Anthill, in the Online Community Report discusses the development of anthill communities on the Internet. Anthill communities are large groups of people who come together through online networks, each taking a small piece of responsibility for a large significant project. Open source software development is one of the first and most successful examples of an anthill community, producing Linux, Apache, and Mozilla, many people contributing small pits of code, discussing the results, and working out the bugs.

Examples of anthill communties outside the programming community include OpenLaw and ThinkCycle.