Community networking-a LAKES approach

LAKES is an architecture for collaborative working developed at IBM Hursley to support a wide range of collaborative applications of the »same time/different place» variety across different platforms and communications media. Although it springs from work on desktop conferencing systems designed for business users, LAKES has been designed as a flexible architecture. One test of its flexibility is to see how well it can support the special needs of Community Networking. This paper outlines some key elements of the architecture and discusses ways in which it can be used to solve a variety of Community Networking problems.