Virtual communities are a phenomenon that is becoming more common as the information technology comes with in reach for the general public. This report will bring the theories and construction of a virtual community together. The purpose of this report is to describe the different theories that have emerged from the research within this field and to examine the work procedures that have been used during the development of a site for a MDA-community. The MDA-website is a homepage on the Internet that was developed to bring the students closer together. The report describes the work of the project group, why the website was not completed and at the end the theories are looked at on the basis of the construction of the website..

Title: Share anything Swedish ? a study of CommunityOfSweden.com (Share anything Swedish ? en studie av CommunityOfSweden.com).Number of pages: 57 (64 including attachments).Author: Daniela Brandel.Tutor: Else Nygren.Course: Media and Communication Studies C.Period: Fall 2008.University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University.Purposes/Aims: To learn what happens when the public-private tourism organisation VisitSweden starts an online community, where anyone is free to post stories and photos about a Swedish experience, and to understand how a participatory culture can help an organisation develop relevant material and thereby reach a wider audience.Material/Method: The study is an analysis of VisitSweden's community CommunityOfSweden, its structures as well as VisitSweden's use of the information posted by the readers on the community. Hence the material consists mainly of content from the community www.communityofsweden.com and the webpage www.visitsweden.com. In addition, the study is also based on an interview with VisitSwedens communitydriver Tommy Sollén.Main results: Members of CommunityOfSweden help VisitSweden to promote Sweden. This is possible because the community posting format and the participatory culture within the community are well designed and planned by VisitSweden, even though the organisation was not completely sure about the outcome.

A trend since the early 90?s has been that some public libraries offer a special shelf containing environmental information to the community, but it seems as though the subject has been overlooked by the literature and the science community. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to study how three independent public libraries work with environmental information that is made available to the community. The following questions were addressed: 1) Which arguments can be found as to why the libraries offer this activity? 2) How does the environmental work at the public libraries look and what does it contain of? 3) Are there any similarities or differences in this work between the three libraries?To answer these questions interviews with librarians were carried out; observations were made to complement the interviews.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how a local community, and those who dwell within its borders, are affected when a large scale windmill park is planned in its immediate vicinity. I have used a qualitative approach and conducted semi structured interviews to gather empirical data. The study took place in a small Swedish village named Svartnäs, situated in the region Dalarna.I have used the concept of community as a symbolic construction (Cohen 1984), that together with the theory of structuration (Giddens 1984) and the notion of expert system (Giddens 1996) served as my main theoretical perspectives.Even though the windmill park is not built yet, its impact on the people and the local community of Svartnäs has been considerable. In the traces of the new windmill park new options and constraints, that will play an important role in the lives of the people who dwell in Svartnäs, are arising. The windmill project is enlarging old conflicts and is creating a divided village.

Virtual Communities is an increasingly common phenomenon on the Internet. Most of the Virtual Communities are operated and maintained on a non-profit basis with a direction towards entertainment. However, as more state administrated and commercial services become web-based, we believe that the number of Virtual Communities with a community-based or commercial direction will increase in a near future. In this thesis, we describe our participation in, and studies of, a number of Virtual Communities with focus on the IRC-channel ?3dfxsweden?.

Denna rapport presenterar ett projekt vars syfte a?r att utveckla och fo?ra?ndra en affa?rsenhet interna nyhetskommunikation. Syftet med projektet a?r att utveckla kommunikationen till tva?va?gskommunikation med hja?lp av sociala medier. Rapporten beskriver hur projektet har fortskridit med dess olika faser, arbetsmetoder och underso?kningsresultat.

AbstractWe are with this paper trying to identify some factors that have an influence on youths mental health. Our theoretical starting points are about how school, family, work, individualization, media and lifestyle effect youths mental health. This paper is based on three deep interviews and former reports. The result show how individualization in the community cause insecurity and the family band are breaking up more than before. Youth?s health effects negative by the ability to not get a job.

Event marketing has during the last decade become a wide spread marketing method. This is because the marketing clutter has increased heavily during the past years and brands are looking for new ways to reach their target audience. The previously well accepted marketing measurement "satisfaction" has shown tendencies no longer to be sufficient for success in today's competitive marketplace. Therefore, the research has somewhat moved to the measurement "brand love" to explain differences in strategic consumer behavior. That is the background to why this report examines and answers the question if a brand through event marketing can enhance brand love.

The goal of this essay was to study if the way gaming review sites presented their review evaluation has any influences the level of product involvement in the users it attracts. The assumption we did during the essay was that there was a connection between user?s level of product involvement and the quality of the community. To test this assumption we started out by performing observations on the comment sections in three gaming news sites which varied in their method for evaluating games. The result of these observations showed a significantly higher community quality in one of the websites.

Lately an increasing portion of the public debate in Sweden has been devoted to how societies may facilitate entrepreneurship, yet a negligible portion of this debate has discussed the impact of the community spirit on entrepreneurial activity. Further, this connection is a relatively uncharted field in terms of research as well. The aim of this study is accordingly to advance the study surrounding the impact of community spirit on the propensity for entrepreneurial activity and add new empirical data and insights to the existing body of theory. A four-month ethnographic study of the Provo-Orem region in Utah, USA, comprising of in-depth interviews and participant observations, was therefore undertaken with the aim of understanding the community spirit in the studied region and its influence on entrepreneurship. The thesis finds that numerous values such as self-reliance, family focus and security together with a strong religious culture make up the essence of the community spirit in Provo-Orem.

I denna uppsats har vi undersökt hur man kan värdera en Internet-community. Vi har genomfört intervjuer med tre fallföretag, Glife, Lunarstorm samt Stallet.se. Utfrån dessa intervjuer samt den analys vi gjort har vi utformat en möjlig värderingsmodell för Internet-communities..

This study examines the closure of public libraries, and the nonprofit organizations takeover of them as a phenomenon. The aim is to understand why the nonprofit takeover is common and what the takeover symbolizes and if the discourse in media invokes the views on libraries and the profession.Interviews were made with librarians, politicians and representatives of a nonprofit organization to study different sides of the phenomenon. Other empirical data were found in local and national newspapers and media-channels. I discovered that public libraries are highly valued by both politicians and the community. The study also showed that a library in a community makes people feel valued.

The aim of this study has been to examine what students within the sport of skydiving think about their education and the social spirit of the community. The purpose of the study is thereby to answer the study's aim through the following questions; how does group dynamics and social solidarity work within the skydiving community, how do the students feel about group dynamics and social solidarity within the skydiving community, and what factors makes the students feel included or respectively excluded from the spirit of the togetherness?The theoretical part of the study focuses on group dynamics and groups overall. Further on earlier research within adventure sports and skydiving regarding group dynamics and community spirit is presented. My survey is based on 35 interviews with skydiving students.The result shows that the community spirit within skydiving sports is described by the students as very special, unique, and strong among the members.

The theory of ?security communities? is generally understood as ?dependable expectations of peaceful change? between groups and whether or not the African Union can be said to meet that criteria has been contested in the research community. One of the central disagreements lie in the nature of the region?s conflicts, of which a majority are intrastate but with tendencies of transnational involvement. This paper seeks to understand how extensive this involvement is and how it affects the possibility of classifying the African Union as a security community.

Sustainable development has become more and more important over the past years. The term Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is closely connected to sustainable development and focuses on organizations responsibility towards the society and the environment in which it exists. Companies within the mining industry were among the first to initiate CSR-work due to the fact that they have a great impact at the local community, both socially and environmentally. Today they are still in the forefront of the development of CSR-questions in general, and community involvement and development in particular. Earlier studies made on this area have focused on the strategic level of community involvement and development.