The purpose of this study is to find the factors that enhance member participation in business-to-customer virtual communities. Although there are many factors influencing member participation, this study limits its independent variables to those of managing strategy and information system quality. In addition to finding their direct impacts, this study identifies indirect effects through two m...

this paper has three parts. in the first part, we bring to the fore an ancient vedic concept of mesocosm and discuss its religious and cosmic significance within indian religion. this part also brings an initial approach towards philosophy of spirituality by focusing on the role of breath within the very concept of mesocosm. in the second part, based on our preliminary analysis, we present an o...

Mediation is a voluntary process whereby a neutral and impartial third party-t-he mediator--is present to facilitate communication and negotiation between the disputing parties so that amicable settlements can be agreed. Being confidential and non-adversarial in nature, the mediation process and skills are particularly applicable in clinical practice to facilitate challenging communications fol...

The Knowledgeable Community is a framework of knowledge sharing and reuse based on a multi-agent architecture. In this paper, we describe the scope and goal of the Knowledgeable Community project, present the organizational structure that facilitates mediation between those agents requesting for a service and those providing the service, and illustrate a technique of ontology-based mediation by...

Mediation may be defined as a process in which disputants attempt to resolve their differences with the assistance of an acceptable third party. The mediator’s objectives are typically to help the parties search for a mutually acceptable solution to their conflict and to counter tendencies toward competitive win-lose strategies and objectives. Mediators are most commonly single individuals, but...

Based on the social network perspective and work group perspective, this study brings social interaction tie and membership esteem together as the mediating variables between knowledge contribution and social identity to construct an inductive route model, aiming to understand how social identity and self-identity form based on knowledge contribution behaviors in virtual communities. To assess ...

Enabled by Information & Communication Technologies (ICT), online tourism communities are in the process of revolutionizing the way information is shared and distributed in the travel industry. Interpreting online tourism communities as a particular kind of information system, previous research in this area has argued that tourism communities may enhance the quality of information available to ...

Research has generally supported the effectiveness of restorative justice (RJ) programs on a number of outcomes; however, little research has examined the effectiveness of variations in the intervention. This study examined several variations of an RJ program for juvenile offenders, including direct mediation, indirect forms of victim/offender mediation accomplished without direct victim/ offen...