Communities and Technologies 2005

This book includes 23 papers dealing with the impact of modern information and communication technologies that support a wide variety of communities: local communities, virtual communities, and communities of practice, such as knowledge communities and scientific communities. The volume is the result of the second multidisciplinary "Communities and Technologies Conference", a major event in this emerging research field. The various chapters discuss how communities are affected by technologies, and how understanding of the way that communities function can be used in improving information systems design. This state of the art overview will be of interest to computer and information scientists, social scientists and practitioners alike.

Local Communities.- Does the Internet Enhance the Capacity of Community Associations?.- Information Technology in Support of Public Deliberation.- Local Communities: Relationships between 'real' and 'virtual' social capital.- Extending Social Constructivism with Institutional Theory: A Broadband Civic Networking Case.- Minimalist Design for Informal Learning in Community Computing.- Virtual Communities.- Virtual Community Management as Socialization and Learning.- File-Sharing Relationships - conflicts of interest in online gift-giving.- Acceptance and Utility of a Systematically Designed Virtual Community for Cancer Patients.- How to Win a World Election: Emergent Leadership in an International Online Community.- A Bosom Buddy Afar Brings a Distant Land Near: Are Bloggers a Global Community?.- Knowledge & Scientific Communities.- Archetypes of Knowledge Communities.- Local Virtuality in an Organization: Implications for Community of Practice.- Taking a Differentiated View of Intra-organizational Distributed Networks of Practice.- Structuring of Genre Repertoire in a Virtual Research Team.- Principles for Cultivating Scientific Communities of Practice.- A Study of Online Discussions in an Open-Source Software Community.- Experiments.- Citizen Participation through E-Forum: a Case of Wastewater Issues.- E-Commerce, Communities and Government - a Snapshot of the Australian Experience.- Collective Action in Electronic Networks of Practice: An Empirical Study of Three Online Social Structures.- Bridging among Ethnic Communities by Cross-cultural Communities of Practice.- Supporting Privacy Management via Community Experience and Expertise.- Systems.- Regulation Mechanisms in an Open Social Media Using a Contact Recommender System.- Supporting Communities byProviding Multiple Views.