In this paper I outline the characteristics of built environments that are believed to be effective in supporting social activity in physical space. I then discuss the degree to which these features can be translated into digital space. I argue that, although we can learn much from studying place-based communities, simply replicating the appearance of participants, architectural backdrops, and ...

We have been experiencing an explosion in the market of social websites that aim not only to entertain us, but also to help us enlarge our professional networks, to redefine business models and capture new customers, to modify the way learning and teaching are performed, among others. So far, little research has been done on what drives individuals to contribute to online communities, as there ...

Communities offer a context for people to meet, communicate and collaborate. Tools to support communities usually provide a communication and coordination medium and functionalities to find communication partners. Thereby, they strengthen existing communities or enable completely new (virtual) communities. In this paper we briefly present some ideas towards the extension of community support to...

A number of conditions are necessary for the formation of ‘glue’ to keep an online community together. One condition of the ‘glue’ is community knowledge. We describe a theoretical basis and a practical representation framework on which community knowledge can be built and used. An illustrative example is given and further work noted.

search pointers organize the main part of the application on the internet. however, because of information management hardware, high volume of data and word similarities in different fields the most answers to the user s’ questions aren`t correct. so the web graph clustering and cluster placement in corresponding answers helps user to achieve his or her intended results. community (web communit...

the study was carried out to investigate the effective soil and topographic features on distribution of plant types in sanib taftan watershed in sistan-and-balouchestan province, iran. initially, land units map was specified by combining three maps of slope, aspect and altitude. five types including artemisia santolina- hammada salicornica, artemisia sieberi- amygdalus lycioides, artemisia lehm...

As online health communities (OHCs) grow, users find it challenging to properly search, read, and contribute to the community because of its overwhelming content. Our goal is to understand OHC users’ needs and requirements for better delivering large-scale OHC content. We interviewed 14 OHC users with interests in diabetes to investigate their attitudes and needs towards using OHCs and 2 OHC ad...

Purpose: While most literature concerning knowledge sharing examines it as an organizational method for innovation and value creation, this paper considers online knowledge sharing as an individual behavior decision embedded in a virtual community. We attempt to explore which sharing behavior can help individual participants gain a better position in an online community, improving social status...

As online communities are becoming more and more relevant to business, it is critical to understand why individuals are motivated to contribute content longitudinally. In this paper, we draw on existing literature on motivation and technology characteristics to conceptualize a model of longitudinal content contribution. We view longitudinal content contribution phenomenon as a recursive process...