This work investigates the effect of ecological interactions between organisms on the evolutionary dynamics of a community. A spatially explicit, individual-based model is presented, in which organisms compete for space and resources. We investigated how introducing the potential for mutualistic relationships (where the presence of one type of organism stimulates the growth of another type, and...

Virtual communities are becoming increasingly popular, particularly on the Internet, as a means for like-minded individuals to pursue common goals. It is a way to access and to share knowledge and information among participants of such communities without physical or hardware constraints. The concept of a community of interest can be supported in a virtual community in order to bring the approp...

In this paper, we built an agent-based model to integrate and synthesize social science theories to inform online community design. As an example, we use the model to examine how various styles of moderating online conversations affect community performance. We compared three styles of moderation – no moderation, in which all members are exposed to all messages; community-level moderation, in w...

The knowledge-based economy has created the need for new learning models that are making a bigger case of the human dimension (such as motivation or social aspects) and of the organizational contexts (such as the organizational goals). This paper presents some design principles for the elaboration of eLearning systems following these new models. These principles rely on the idea of providing th...