Virtual communities have been extensively examined—including their history, how to define them, how to design tools to support them, and how to analyze them. However, most of this research has focused on adult virtual communities, ignoring the unique considerations of virtual communities for children and youth. Young people have personal, social, and cognitive differences from adults. Thus, whi...

Virtual patients’ communities are developing on the Internet. These communities allow frequent interactions among patients, who can share health-related information within an interactive environment. However, we know very little about what determines patients’ online collective action on Web 2.0 social networks. Accordingly, this researchin-progress examines why patients interact with others an...

background: in-service training courses are one of the most available programs that are used to improve the quantity and quality level of the staff services in various organizations, including libraries and information centers. with the advent of new technologies in the field of education, the problems and shortcomings of traditional in-service training courses were replaced with virtual ones. ...

This paper discusses the development of virtual communities and especially e-learning communities. In particular, this paper is inspired by VirRAD European project, and presents the intermediate results that have raised from the definition of this virtual radiopharmacy community.

In the field of Open Innovation, virtual communities set up by companies in order to integrate customers into their innovation process are a new and promising instrument. As there is actually a lack of systematic approaches for designing these communities, in this paper, we propose a pattern based two-step model, which enables non-intuitive design choices for virtual communities for innovations.

E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers. But what is involved in establishing and maintaining virtual communities? This paper addresses two questions: Does a sense of community similar to that sometimes observed in physical communities also occur in virtual settings? And how is a sense of virtual community maintained? These questions are examine...

Communities of practice are recognised as important to the social fabric of knowledge (Wenger, 2004), and are described as social structures which enable knowledge to be managed by practitioners. According to Wenger (2004), members of these groups share a passion for something they know how to do, and they regularly interact for the purpose of improving their discipline. More recently in the li...