2660 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 8.13 Social Interactive Media and Virtual Community Practices: Retrospective and an R&D Agenda Demosthenes Akoumianakis Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece AbstrAct This chapter attempts to consolidate concepts, ideas and results reported in this volume in an effort to synthesize an agenda and sketch a roadmap for future research and development on virtual community practices facilitated by synergistic combination of social interactive media. In this endeavor, the author revisits the notions of new media, communities and social practice, in the light of the preceding chapters and with the intention to pickup seemingly hetero- geneous concepts and sketch the puzzle of social interactive media and virtual community practice. The ultimate target is to make inroads towards a reference model for understanding and framing online social practice under the different regimes constituted by new media and social computing. IntroductIon In this volume we have been concerned with the design of virtual community practices as enabled or facilitated by a broad range of new media (i.e., social software, collaborative practice toolkits and emerging infrastructures such as Grids and Web 2.0) and performed by human collaborators in a variety of community settings (i.e., online communities, virtual communities of practice, cross-organization communities of practice, etc). In this effort, three key concepts stand out very promptly as primary challenges motivated by a variety of theoretical and / or engineering perspectives. These are the concepts of ‘new media’, ‘community’ and ‘social practice’. As discussed in the introductory tutorial (Chapter I in this volume), these concepts con- tinue to pose numerous challenges since common DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-340-1.ch022