Communities are groupings of distributed objects that communicate, directly orindirectly,throughthemediumofasharedcontext.Thisconferencebrought togetherresearchersinterestedinthetechnicalissuesofsupportingcommunities. DCW 2002 was held in Sydney, Australia, and was hosted by the Software EngineeringResearchGroupandtheSchoolofComputerScienceandEngine- ingattheUniversityofNewSouthWales.ItwasthefourthintheDCWseries, thepreviousconferenceshavingtakenplaceinQu' ebec(2000,LNCS1830)and inRostock(1998and1999,UniversityofRostockPress). Theprogramcommitteeselected25papersfrom59submissionsfromaround theworld.Eachsubmissionwasfullyrefereedbyatleastthreereviewers,either members of the program committee or other external referees. Reviewers were selectedtoensuretheyhadtherequiredexpertiseforthepapers'topics.Special carewastakentoavoidcon?ictsofinterestbyensuringthatifaprogramc- mittee member was co-author of one of the submissions, then the paper would be reviewed by program committee members or additional reviewers who were notclosecollaboratorsofthesubmittingauthors. Inadditiontothesepapers,theproceedingsbeginwithafullyrefereeds- marychapter,entitledOpenProblemsinDistributedCommunities,whichgives anoverviewofthe?eld. This year, we were pleased to welcome as the invited speaker Philippe van Nedervelde, CEO of E-SPACES (Belgium) and X3D Technologies (USA), who gaveusafascinatingpresentationonVirtual3DWorldCommunities. We would like to thank the members of the program committee and the additional reviewers for the thorough reviews of the submitted papers, the - thorsforsubmittingtheircontributions,andtheauthorsofacceptedpapersfor theircollaborationinpreparingtheseproceedings.SpecialthanksgoestoBlanca Mancilla, the local arrangements chair, for all the work she did before, during, andaftertheconference. We are convinced that this conference series is very timely, and meets the needs of many researchers interested in building networked communities. We hope that you ?nd the proceedings interesting and stimulating, and hope that youwilljoinusinUlminSpring2004forthenextDCWconference. September2002 JohnPlaice PeterKropf PeterSchulthess JacobSlonim Organization DCW 2002 was organized with the support of the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Software Engineering Research Group at the Univ- sity of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, in cooperation with ACM, ACM SIGPLAN,andACMSIGWEB.