Challenges in promoting communities with ict in a widely scattered and heterogeneous setting

The paper reports on the outcomes of a project whose aim was to study a network of farms in the agricultural domain and promote their adoption of social computing technologies responding to their needs. This aim proved to be highly challenging since the network was found to be heterogeneous, characterized by tiers of different nature and composed of competing/cooperating actors. The paper illustrates the challenges we faced, the strategy we conceived that led to the introduction of a community-oriented ICT, and it outlines the steps of this complex process