Exploring Religious Community Online is the first comprehensive study of the development and implications of online communities for religious groups. This book investigates religious community online by examining how Christian communities have adopted internet technologies, and looks at how these online practices pose new challenges to offline religious community and culture.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Exploring Service Science, IESS 2020, held in Porto, Portugal, in February 2020. The 28 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The book includes papers that extend the view on different concepts related to the development of the Service Science domain of study, applying them to frameworks, advanced technologies, and tools for the design of new, digitally-enabled service systems. This book is structured in six parts, based on the six main conference themes, as follows: Customer Experience, Data Analytics in Service, Emerging Service Technologies, Service Design and Innovation, Service Ecosystems, and Service Management.

An engaging overview of telecommunications between computers. Topics include communications basics, hardware checklist, reasons for remote computing, file transfer and electronic mail, security and viruses, and a sampling of practical applications and techniques.

A study of Everquest that provides a snapshot of multiplayer gaming culture, questions the truism that computer games are isolating and alienating, and offers insights into broader issues of work and play, gender identity, technology, and commercial culture. In Play Between Worlds, T. L. Taylor examines multiplayer gaming life as it is lived on the borders, in the gaps—as players slip in and out of complex social networks that cross online and offline space. Taylor questions the common assumption that playing computer games is an isolating and alienating activity indulged in by solitary teenage boys. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), in which thousands of players participate in a virtual game world in real time, are in fact actively designed for sociability. Games like the popular Everquest, she argues, are fundamentally social spaces. Taylor's detailed look at Everquest offers a snapshot of multiplayer culture. Drawing on her own experience as an Everquest player (as a female Gnome Necromancer)—including her attendance at an Everquest Fan Faire, with its blurring of online—and offline life—and extensive research, Taylor not only shows us something about games but raises broader cultural issues. She considers "power gamers," who play in ways that seem closer to work, and examines our underlying notions of what constitutes play—and why play sometimes feels like work and may even be painful, repetitive, and boring. She looks at the women who play Everquest and finds they don't fit the narrow stereotype of women gamers, which may cast into doubt our standardized and preconceived ideas of femininity. And she explores the questions of who owns game space—what happens when emergent player culture confronts the major corporation behind the game.

The discipline of Services Science, introduced by IBM in 2002, has emerged and matured in a true transdisciplinary atmosphere. Encompassing disciplines not only in management and engineering, it also draws from disciplines such as social and cog- tive sciences, law, ethics, economics etc. to address the theoretical and practical - pects of the challenging services industry and its economy. Services Science leverages methods, results and knowledge stemming from these disciplines towards the development of its own concepts, methods, techniques and approaches thus creating the basis for true trans-disciplinary gatherings and the p- duction of transdisciplinary results. Services Science is building a concrete framework for transdisciplinary purposes. IESS1. 0 – the First International Conference on Exploring Services Science – was the first international conference held in Europe in this domain. The conference took place during February 17–19, 2010 in Geneva, Switzerland. The goal of the conf- ence was to build upon the growing community to further study and understand this emerging discipline. Academics, researchers and practitioners of all disciplines were invited to contribute their results and approaches to Services Science in a tra- disciplinary setting. In order to achieve the best possible mix of disciplines and their representation, the conference call for papers was structured around transdisciplinary service research topics including service innovation, service exploration, service - sign, service engineering, and service sustainability, and around more disciplinary oriented service contexts such as: sectors and services, IT and services, foundations of services science, and governance and management.

The turn of the new millennium has brought with it an explosion of activity around electronic services (e-services) in the form of e-commerce, e-business, e-government, e-learning, and so on. The provision of all possible goods and services electronically via the Internet with the use of semantic web technologies has seen a paradigm shift from the traditional brick-and-mortar location-based services to the ubiquitous provision of goods and services online. An understanding of this paradigm shift and the fundamental properties of e-service composition is required in order to take full advantage of the paradigm. As such, this book provides comprehensive coverage and understanding of the use of e-services within the technological, business, management, and organizational domains. Chapters cover such topics as digitized learning, information and communication technology in sports, cloud computing for universities, and more. This book is a reference book for scholars, researchers, and practitioners looking to update their knowledge on methodologies, theoretical analyses, modeling, simulation, and empirical studies on e-services.

With the increasing reliance on digital means to transact goods that are retail and communication based, e-services continue to develop as key applications for business, finance, industry and innovation.Electronic Services: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications is an all-inclusive research collection covering the latest studies on the consumption, delivery and availability of e-services. This multi-volume book contains over 100 articles, making it an essential reference for the evolving e-services discipline.