I -- Community Inquiry and Informatics: Collaborative Learning Through ICT -- The Participant-Observer in Community-Based Learning as Community Bard -- Learning in Communities: A Distributed Intelligence Perspective -- Spiders in the Net: Universities as Facilitators of Community-Based Learning -- Designing Technology for Local Citizen Deliberation -- Supporting the Appropriation of ICT: End-User Development in Civil Societies -- Developmental Learning Communities -- Social Reproduction and Its Applicability for Community Informatics -- Communities, Learning, and Democracy in the Digital Age -- Radical Praxis and Civic Network Design -- II -- Local Groups Online: Political Learning and Participation -- Community-Based Learning: The Core Competency of Residential, Research-Based Universities -- Sustaining a Community Computing Infrastructure for Online Teacher Professional Development: A Case Study of Designing Tapped In -- Expert Recommender: Designing for a Network Organization -- Patterns as a Paradigm for Theory in Community-Based Learning -- Architecture, Infrastructure, and Broadband Civic Network Design: An Institutional View -- Supporting Community Emergency Management Planning Through a Geocollaboration Software Architecture.

Most learning takes place in communities. People continually learn through their participation with others in everyday activities. Such learning is important in contemporary society because formal education cannot prepare people for a world that changes rapidly and continually. We need to live in learning communities. This collection of papers is not the definitive summary of learning in communities. It is assuredly more prolegomena than coda. Learning is increasingly recognized as a critical facet of lifetime activity, one that must become better integrated with all that people do. At the same time, community structures are increasingly recognized as a critical category of social organization – flexible and adaptable, capable of innovation and development, and yet just as strongly nurturing and supportive. The promise of learning in communities lies ahead of us. This set of essays intends to propel us all along that path.