Synchronous Communities

We propose the synchronous community, a set of context- aware programs held together by a single shared context that permeates all of the programs, together with a synchronous discrete semantics. The different programs may communicate point-to-point or by making changes to the shared context. With the synchronous semantics, changes to the context will be perceived by all other programs, but only in the subsequent instant. As a result, it becomes possible to define the semantics for an entire community, and even for multiple interacting communities.