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Many attempts have been made to provide a definition for" community network"(see, eg, Center for Civic Networking, 1993; Schuler 1994; Beamish 1995) or related initiatives, such as" free nets" and" civic nets." Furthermore, over the years, community networks (CNs) have addressed a variety of goals and evolved along several paths. The original idea, the subsequent initiatives and their evolution, their successes, and their failures, lead to a concept of CN that includes:

• Initiatives that guarantee everybody Net access, thus granting everybody citizenship in the networked society (Gurstein 2000)• A free online environment designed to promote and favor communication, cooperation, and the exchange of services among citizens and all the public and private members of a local community (nonprofit organizations, government institutions, and companies), while simultaneously opening the local community to online communication with other parts of the world (De Cindio, Sonnante, and Cannada 1997); from this perspective, the expression" community portal" has been applied• Virtual cities, interwoven with the real city, that support communication and work, thus extending the city into a new dimension where time and space constraints are reduced (De Kerchkove 1998)