OBJECTIVE To explore the experiences of carers and families of people with depression. DESIGN AND SETTING Structured focus groups conducted in six Australian capital cities between February 2002 and July 2002. Thematic analyses were conducted using the QSR NUD*IST software package for qualitative data. PARTICIPANTS Thirty-seven carers or family members. RESULTS Thematic analyses highlight...

The phrase "virtual community" is often used to describe long term, computer-mediated conversations amongst large groups. This paper suggests that such conversations may be better viewed as instances of a participatory genre, rather than as community. A genre-oriented analysis is useful because it encourages a focus on the medium within which the discourse is embodied. As an example we analyze ...

Organizations have the potential to achieve advantage through communities of practice (COPs) initiatives. However, establishing and sustaining COPs is a challenging task. Facilitation is needed to help COPs overcome difficulties throughout their life stages. Facilitators take on leadership roles within these virtual communities, yet little is known about the challenges related to their roles. T...

Purpose – This study aims to better understand individuals’ motives for contributing knowledge in an online community. Design/methodology/approach – An integrated model is developed based on a motivational model and social cognitive theory. To validate the model two online communities: the Electronic Engineering Times in Taiwan and China were surveyed. Findings – It was found that both perceive...

The rise of the availability of a variety of mobile devices in the personal and professional domains leads to an increased need of middleware and organizational structures. Due to the recent improvement of the computing power of mobile devices, mobile users may now also act as service providers. We design a service-oriented architecture to introduce mobile virtual communities enabling mobile de...

One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS). WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and performed distribute...

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center has been involved in continuous research concerning the development of grid environments. In the scope of the PROGRESS project we designed a Grid Service Provider (GSP) which acts as a new additional layer between the grid and grid user interfaces. The introduction of the GSP enables easy development of many different grid user interfaces such as web ...

Grid environments consist of the volatile integration of discrete heterogeneous resources. The notion of the Grid is to unite different users and organisations and pool their resources into one large computing platform where they can harness, inter-operate, collaborate and interact. If the Grid Community is to achieve this objective, then participants (Users and Organisations) need to be willin...

Femtocells have been shown to improve the quality of service for indoor users, and are actively being pursued by the wireless community. Among the possible access mechanisms for femtocells, the recent focus is on hybrid-access, wherein each femtocell allocates a portion of its resources to the nonsubscribers. In this paper, a scheme is proposed to improve the performance of a hybrid access femt...

Shrinking budgets, reduction in personnel and increasing performance expectations are facts of today's Government environment. The intelligence community has seen these trends stress its ability to collect, manage and disseminate information in an efficient, timely manner. The need to respond to rapidly changing statements of operational interest only exacerbates the problem. It is no longer su...