BACKGROUND Community participation is increasingly seen as a pre-requisite for successful health service uptake. It is notoriously difficult to assess participation and little has been done to advance tools for the assessment of community participation. In this paper we illustrate an approach that combines a 'social psychology of participation' (theory) with 'spider-grams' (method) to assess pa...

azine that we hope will keep AAAI members informed about AI efforts around the world. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence now serves a global audience, and our members, meeting participants, councilors, and officers reside in countries throughout the world. Worldwide AI is designed to meet our expanded audience’s interests. In the columns that will appear in this and ...

DIVergence Awareness (DIVA) is a technological framework for management of divergence occurrence in knowledge communities, which is a precursor to the creation of new knowledge in these communities. The DIVA workspace system is aware of the members’ profiles (skills, interests, etc) and their evolution; and as a result, it can deliver custom-made contributions to the members in an attempt to ma...

The growth of health informatics as a discipline has led to an increase in networks of people with similar interests for discussion, learning and sharing. Alongside these community networks, education and training are gaining interest, with more career opportunities and general public seeking information. This paper highlights the experience of the West Midlands Health Informatics Network and e...

Two studies examined the effect of Extrinsic Value Orientation (Kasser & Ryan, 1993, 1996) upon harvesting strategies and personal profit within commons dilemmas, in which individual and group interests can be at odds. At an individual or within-group level of analysis, extrinsically oriented persons (who value money, fame, and popularity) harvested more than intrinsically oriented persons (who...

Hearns, klein and colleagues set out to develop a maternity care decision-making tool for the British Columbia Northern Health Authority to assist with assessing community needs and values. They are to be commended for thinking outside the traditional decision-making approach which focuses, as they say, on “administration, fiscal and safety issues. solutions often follow previously made decisio...

The paper presents the main design issues of a distance learning course on Business on the Internet. The instructional design is based on a learner centered instructional stratedy allowing learners get opportunity to construct their own knowledge while solving real business problems and transfer their knowledge to other learners. They learn autonomously taking the responsibility for their learn...

N on-Governmental Organizations (‘NGOs’) compliment imperfect educational models with creative and flexible community-based programs. In Northern Ghana, children in poverty often face diminished educational outcomes, and organizations use various strategies to seek justice for these children. NGOs negotiate an uneasy existence as mediators between the spheres of structural bureaucracy and local...