When we think of community, the neighborhood where we grew up immediately comes to mind. But community has come to define a more diverse structure that can be bound by interest as well as geographic location.

We will be looking at different kinds of communities and how the virtual needs of these communites are addressed.

The term 'Virtual Community' is attributed to Howard Rheingold in his 1993 book of the same name.

Today the term has come to mean variety of social groups connected in some ways by the Internet or the World Wide Web. These groups can come together for a brief time to solve a problem or they can be as diverse as thousands of members of a listserv.