Disclosed are mechanisms for initiating and performing tasks by a gang of members. A member of a gang identifies an event or other condition which requires notification to and/or action to be taken by at least a subset, if not all the other members of the gang. The gang member notifies other gang members by sending a message, such as that using reliable group communication using multicast and/or unicast messages. The information notified to other gang members and/or actions to be performed are extensible to meet the needs of the wide-variety of possible applications. A small list of example subject areas of these applications includes collecting, distributing, updating, responding to, and/or other processing of error conditions, routing information (e.g., between systems, from a route processor to line cards within a system, etc.), configuration information, flow control information, statistics or other values, etc.