Local communities: Back to life (live) through IPTV

Enhancing local communities is seen as an enrichment of people's life by providing additional possibilities for the building of relationships and identities. The question is how to improve these local social ties and how to promote interaction among people in local communities. Within this paper we will address this question based on a case study, where a local community is enhanced by an IPTV platform to exchange user-generated audio-visual content. The paper outlines major steps to be considered in a community building process based on results from active user involvement throughout the whole design and development process of new applications in an European project.