With the increasing popularity of electronic commerce, businesses are starting to recognise that developing a good virtual community can help to generate more profits. Virtual communities can be an instrument for building relationships with customers, and retaining customers’ loyalty. Of interest are the similarities and differences in the design preferences of virtual communities across cultur...

This paper explores the design preferences of virtual communities in two cultural groups – the U.S. and China. The design preferences studied are web design, tools used and types of virtual communities preferred. Content analysis was employed to study twenty of the most popular Chinese and U.S. virtual communities. The study found that there are differences in the preference for the type of vir...

Information and communication technology provides design options for the creation of economic value. We consider a particular architecture for the creation of economic value: the communication model of a community and its implementation in peer-to-peer computing architectures. We discuss the socio-economic model of a community, explore the social, political and economic impact of communities an...

BACKGROUND In order to adapt to societal changes, healthcare systems need to switch from a disease orientation to a patient-centered approach. Virtual patient networks are a promising tool to favor this switch and much can be learned from the open and user innovation literature where the involvement of online user communities in the innovation process is well-documented. OBJECTIVES The object...

With the increased usage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to facilitate information sharing and exchange, there has been increased development of and participation in virtual communities. In the Caribbean context, virtual communities are being formed in various sectors (public, private, NGO) in the region for collaboration and information sharing purposes. With the reliance ...

This chapter presents the interrelationships between professional virtual communities and social networks, and analyzes how, and in what ways, these communities play a crucial role in the creation and sharing of knowledge. The chapter begins by outlining how virtual communities are gaining importance in the new environment. It explains what we understand as a professional virtual community and ...

background: in-service education is one of the best and major methods to provide, train and improve the performance of the staffs. this study aims to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the virtual trainings from the staffs' perspective of mashhad university of medical sciences. methods: this is a cross-sectional study conducted among staffs from different parts of the therapy depart...

Virtual communities (hereinafter as VCs) emerged as a new form of business model in electronic business field. Understanding motivations of members’ participation is essential to virtual community organizers. Arguing that interpersonal relationship needs are important to drive members’ participation, this paper used FIRO (Fundamental Interpersonal Relationship Orientation) as framework to explo...

mouth and teeth health care in islam     g. esm hoseini [1]     abstract:   introduction: based on researches, diseases of gum and teeth are in caressingly common in community and have significant effects on many systems in body. that threatens heart, veins, brain and causes myocardial infraction, brain infarction, premature births and skin complications.   in this research, religious education...

Introduction. This paper reports results of an investigation into the needs of persons with disabilities wanting to participate in the use of virtual communities. The aim was to investigate 'how virtual communities for persons with long-term, severe physical disabilities can best be facilitated'? Method . A Grounded Theory approach was adopted to inform the investigation. Indepth interviews wer...