The communicative approach in foreign language teaching claims that the sociocultural context of the communicative event must be considered in order to make communication possible and efficient. Yet, very few scholars in the field of language teaching research have actually studied the nature and procedures of intercultural communication, and only recently a language teaching oriented model of intercultural communicative competence has been defined. The first part of the essay presents the nature of communicative competence and of its implementation in intercultural contexts, i.e. in all the communicative exchanges between people who do not share the same mother tongue/culture. The second part describes an online open access world map of the critical points of intercultural communication, meant to help people who use English as a Lingua Franca, or who study a language, focus the issue of culture as a communicative factor. The map is a work in progress and relies on the contribution of people all over the world in order to become more and more accurate.