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.

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.

GPSR Compliance The European Union's (EU) General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) is a set of rules that requires consumer products to be safe and our obligations to ensure this. If you have any concerns about our products you can contact us on ProductSafety@springernature.com. In case Publisher is established outside the EU, the EU authorized representative is: Springer Nature Customer Service Center GmbH Europaplatz 3 69115 Heidelberg, Germany ProductSafety@springernature.com