This article describes an approach whereby patterns are used to describe management issues and solutions to be used during the project management of team-based software development. The work describes how web 2.0 technologies have been employed to support the use and development of such patterns. To evaluate the success of patterns and the technologies supporting their dissemination the work of 12 software development teams over 2 years is explored. The results of the research describe how students find access to the experiences of their predecessors useful to guide their actions and how they find patterns particularly useful as a way of expressing social issues concerned with the management of student groups. (Contains 2 tables and 7 figures.)