Online communities such as question and answer (QA) systems are growing rapidly and we increasingly rely on them for valuable information and entertainment. However, finding meaningful rewards to motivate participation from the most qualified users, or experts, presents researchers with two main challenges: identifying these users and (2) rewarding their participation. Using an interdisciplinar...

The advent of Web technology has enabled new ways in which groups of people may interact, leading to the development of online communities. In an academic environment these virtual communities can facilitate collaboration and provide new ways for educators to communicate and disseminate their ideas and practices. A website designed to support a community of educators interested in scholarship a...

The Internet and cloud services are key enablers for participation in society. The need for Internet access in areas underserved by commercial telecom operators has often been a motivation to develop community networks. Many examples around the world show successful cooperative developments of open, participatory local networking infrastructures. Such collaborative models have not yet been appl...

O communities (OCs) are a virtual organizational form in which knowledge collaboration can occur in unparalleled scale and scope, in ways not heretofore theorized. For example, collaboration can occur among people not known to each other, who share different interests and without dialogue. An exploration of this organizational form can fundamentally change how we theorize about knowledge collab...

Online learning communities could be seen as tools or resources that enable people to perform actions together online. One could conceptualise the multiplicity of resources both within and outwith the online community as the set of circumstances that support learning. These circumstances might more commonly be referred to as the learning (or the learner’s) context. But what do we understand abo...

In the conventional online communities such as chat systems, bulletin boards and listservers, users who actively provide information are considered valuable, while users who visit online communities just to collect information tend to be regarded as non-contributors. We propose that we should facilitate the latter group of users to turn into active information providers by introducing a novel f...

BACKGROUND To date, research on racial discrimination and health typically has employed explicit self-report measures, despite their potentially being affected by what people are able and willing to say. We accordingly employed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) for racial discrimination, first developed and used in two recent published studies, and measured associations of the explicit and imp...

Online communities are changing how companies and non-profits innovate, lower costs, tap talent, and realize new socio-economic opportunities. In this paper, online communities are predicted to be an important resource in open innovation processes, based on the emerging online community trend of sharing and collaboration among non-professional users. However, in order to take full advantage of ...

The general aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that students belonging to a school online community would show higher levels of both offline bridging and bonding social capital than a control group of students, not using the online community. We further hypothesized that the more students used the online community the higher their level of their offline bonding and bridging social cap...

Despite the promise of community involvement, cohesion and empowerment offered by local community networks (CN) using Internet Technologies, few communities in regional Australia have been able to demonstrate sustainable and vibrant CN which demonstrate increased social, cultural or self-reliance capital. The Faculty of Informatics and Communication at Central Queensland University (CQU) and a ...