Online communities are increasingly important to organizations and the general public, but there is little theoretically based research on what makes some online communities more successful than others. In this article, we apply theory from the field of social psychology to understand how online communities develop member attachment, an important dimension of community success. We implemented a...

We study the distribution of the activity period of users in five of the largest localized versions of the free, online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We find it to be consistent with a mixture of two truncated log-normal distributions. Using this model, the temporal evolution of these systems can be analyzed, showing that the statistical description is consistent over time.

In recent years, increasing attention has been devoted to virtual learning. Individual characteristics are known to play a crucial role in learning processes but only limited research has been conducted in the context of virtual settings. Therefore, we used an integrated multimethod approach in order to examine the impact of types of academic motivation (intrinsic vs. extrinsic) on virtual lear...

Virtual professional communities require a legitimate user-driven specification approach of their network information systems. The specification changes produced should be legitimate in the sense that they are not only meaningful but also acceptable to all members of the community. We regard specification processes as conversations for specification. A Specification Process Model is presented t...

Virtual worlds are online three-dimensional worlds that are often constructed to look much like the real world. As more people begin to use these virtual worlds, virtual communities are emerging enabling various social activities and social interactions to be conducted online. Based on a literature review of social movements, virtual communities and virtual worlds, this paper suggests a framewo...

This paper discusses the Virtual Communities of Care Project that uses a 3D virtual environment, Zora, to support a psycho-educational intervention for pediatric post-organ transplant patients. These patients have difficulties in developing a peer network due to chronic illness, and as a result they are often incompliant to medical and other requirements. Our goals are to examine the extent to ...

This article focuses on the design and use of networked technologies to create learning environments to foster the civic engagement of youth. First, we briefly describe the Zora three-dimensional multiuser environment that engages children in the design of a graphical virtual city and its social organization. Anecdotal data are then used to help define different aspects of civic engagement, nam...

In recent years, increasing attention has been devoted to virtual learning. In the last decade, a large number of studies in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) have assessed how social interaction, learning processes and outcomes in virtual settings are intertwined. Although recent research findings indicate that learners differ with respect to the amount and type of discourse con...

We suggest an updated estimate of the number of Esperanto speakers worldwide, based on the number of people in Facebook who indicate that they speak the language. A simple calculation accompanied by reasonable refinements leads to a number of approximately two million Esperanto users within the internet community alone, probably significantly more worldwide.