The mediaPLAYINGcommunities project aims to establish experiments of communitycoherence and interaction, based on and centred around the pre-school pedagogicalenvironments and involving and reaching out to networks of pedagogical staff, children,parents and local companies. The project intends to let the media playing training andactivities be the focus point of this learning, working and producing community - thus thefocus of the project is not one or the other of the involved target groups, but on theinteraction between these target groups. The mediaPLAYINGcommunities project facesthe challenges of community based and collaborative lifelong learning.The project builds on the basic assumption, that lifelong learning cannot take place inisolated environments but only within meaningful cross-sectorial community activities.The project has decided that bottom-up collaborative activities should be based onexperimenting and training with media and ICT, as these are expected to be the verycore activities in the future local ICT based infrastructures, - in the form of media playingactivities and learning, and rooted in and organised around the pre-schoolenvironments, as they are the intersection points of many citizen groups in thecommunity: children, school systems, pedagogical learning environments, parents,families, health systems, etc. The mediaPLAYINGcommunities will also be able to link tothe cultural institutions and private companies in the communities, because the mediaactivities will involve these community players in the different European media projectsand in the European mobility of groups of children, teachers and parents.The mediaPLAYINGcommunities focuses on the potentials of ICT and media ascatalysts of social change and community coherence and to reformulate the Motto of theGerman Presidency of the European Union: Education unites, we would also say mediaplaying unites.The ultimate goal of the project is to develop and test a Model for bottom-up communityactivities on which the future ICT infrastructures can be build. The ultimate contributionto a bottom-up basis for building ICT infrastructures in the local communities will bereflected in the transformation of the project's ICT community web environment from thewww.mediaPLAYING.com (project web environment) to thewww.mediaPLAYINGcommunities.net (Model for web and media based communities) tobe disseminated, exploited and implemented in other communities through the postprojectnetwork.