Paper user-interfaces for local community support

Looking at different examples of real life “communities”, one can roughly distinguish communities formed by people who are interested in the same topic and communities of people that share some kind of common environment. The first kind of communities can be called “communities of interest”. Examples for such communities are experts in a particular domain or collectors. Examples for communities of people who share some kind of common environment are “communities of practice” [Lave and Wenger 1991] or communities that share a place where they live or work (e.g. the inhabitants of a city). The latter type of communities will be called “local communities” in the rest of the paper.