Creating software applications that foster web-based social interaction is still very hard and currently beyond the capabilities of end-users, since highly skilled web application developers are needed. Consequently, the cost of community formation and evolution beyond those based on simple, general and stable interaction patterns is still too high. Individuals, however, looking either for new, partially formed, or already standing communities whose interactions are much more domain specific and specialised need software tools and platforms that support the formation of and the adjustment to communities, as well as the adaptation to new, perhaps dynamically evolving, events during a community’s lifespan.

CBIT aims at transcending the current level of social software applications and platforms for community building into the meta-level for which today’s applications will arise as particular instances. For this we shall approach community building as an iterative process consisting of community formation, interaction, and growth. In CBIT a community is understood as a group of peers whose interactions are defined via agreements on social contracts on behaviour, meaning, and reliability, and represented in a community charter. Consequently, community building will be subject to the mechanisms to be developed in the scope of this project for charter specification and selection, charter grounding and enactment, and charter revision and modification. To concretise this approach, we shall realise it for a community-building process that fosters collaboration in the generation of digital educational contents.