Introduction The Internet was not invented for education at beginning (Pett Grabinger, 1995), but it has influenced educational systems considerably, especially by providing another way for distance learning. This powerful communication function is superior to any other educational media. Students can conduct their own self-directed learning without interacting with others in an online learning...

Community collective efficacy is an important concept in studying various community problems and in developing community well-beings. While existing research on collective efficacy mainly focuses on building analytical or statistical models from informant survey data, this paper develops a complexity science-informed agent-based model to study the dynamic process of collective efficacy formatio...

Community-based software development is a promising model to help reduce the pressures such as development costs, human resources access, new market development, and building business competencies. But the big concern is how to ensure the quality of the outsourcing service. In this paper, a service quality evaluation method for community-based software outsourcing process has been proposed. A s...

In open online communities, everyone can freely express opinions about other entities. As the quality of opinions may vary, it is important for users to evaluate opinions in order to determine how much to rely on. In this paper, we propose a novel trust model stemmed from the diffusion theory in social science (called DiffTrust), to evaluate the opinions of users (referred to as advisors) by mo...

This paper gives a brief overview of current technologies in systems handling encyclopaedic knowledge. Since most of the electronic encyclopaedias currently available are rather static and inflexible, greatly enhanced functionality is introduced that enables users to work more effectively and collaboratively. Users have the ability, for instance, to add annotations to every kind of object and c...

Although long championed, a global language has not come to fruition despite considerable efforts. Many fear that such a language would undermine the particularistic, identity-constituting primary languages of local and national communities. These concerns can be addressed at least in part by utilizing a two-tiered approach in which efforts to protect primary languages are intensified at the sa...

This paper introduces a rationale for and approach to the study of sustainability in computerized community information systems. It begins by presenting a theoretical framework for posing questions about sustainability predicated upon assumptions from social construction of technology and adaptive structuration theories. Based in part on the literature and in part on our own experiences in deve...

lsis is a toolkit for building applications consisting of cooperating processes in a distributed system. Group management and group communication are two basic building blocks provided by Isis. This approach has proven successful, and Isis’ large user community is putting substantial demands on these mechanisms. To accommodate these demands a complete redesign of the system, called Horus, is be...