In recent years, there has been a growing number of programs employing health navigators to assist underserved individuals in overcoming barriers to obtaining regular and quality health care. This article describes the perspectives and experiences of community-based health navigators in the Cambodian and Laotian communities involved in a REACH 2010 project to reduce health disparities in breast...

A few virtual community support systems, with some unsophisticated tools, appeared at the beginning of the era of Internet availability and pervasive computing. Ever since however, many such systems have emerged focusing on classified interests and motivations, and aiming to give people more possibilities to socialize and keep in touch with each other. A growing population in Europe, the elderl...

Computer based community support systems can provide powerful support in direct exchange of information and in finding people for information exchange. Such applications usually make use of information about the user (user profile information) for personalization and for supporting contact management. As in real life, a user will interact with different communities (community support applicatio...

Online Health Communities (OHCs) have become a major source of social support for people with health problems. Using a case study of an OHC among breast cancer survivors, we revealed the types of social support embedded in each post using text mining techniques. Then we aggregated users’ activities in different types of social support and identified different roles that users play in an OHC via...

We examine the evolution of the public electronic trading community over the Internet, based on the case study of two e-hubs for direct materials in the hi-tech industry in Asia. We identify three different stages in the transformation of the public online trading community. We also observe that there are two types of online trading community formation at a different stage of the public communi...

This paper puts forth a vision and a possible architecture for a community knowledge evolution system. We propose augmenting a multimedia document repository (digital library) with innovative knowledge evolution support, including computer-mediated communications, community process support, decision support, advanced hypermedia features, and conceptual knowledge structures. These tools and the ...

Sense of virtual community is an important component of successful virtual communities. Defined as members’ feelings of belonging, identity, and attachment with each other in computer-mediated communication, sense of virtual community distinguishes virtual communities from mere virtual groups. Sense of virtual community is believed to come from members’ exchange of social support as well as cre...

Using data from a new field experiment in South Korea, we study how information from virtual communities such as stock message boards influences investors’ trading decisions and investment performance. Motivated by recent studies in psychology, we conjecture that investors would use message boards to seek information that confirms their prior beliefs. This confirmation bias would make them more...

Online healthcare communities (OHCs) encourage people to disclose their personal information with others to seek support and to accelerate research and help create better treatments. However, disclosing personal information might cause privacy disclosure and some risks. This paper aims to explore what factors and how those factors affect people’s personal information disclosure intention in OHC...

This paper puts forth a vision and an architecture for a community knowledge evolution system. We propose augmenting a multimedia document repository (digital library) with innovative knowledge evolution support, including computermediated communications, community process support, decision support, advanced hypermedia features, and conceptual knowledge structures. These tools, and the techniqu...