Project proposal

I propose to study the community section of Cool Running (http://www.coolrunning.com/cgi-bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi), a website that informs and supports runners of all ages and skill levels. A set of discussion forums comprises the bulk of the site's Community section and would likely be the focus of my study. Broadly, I am interested in how e-communities support and motivate offline action, in this case, a running regimen. I chose this genre of e-community because they are closely related to a fitness related project I completed last semester. I would like to extend my understanding of how communities support fitness activities.

[Description]
Kim outlines five stages of community involvement: visitors, novices, regulars, leaders, and elders. Kim makes frequent use of an analogy between online and physical communities in describing the stages of the Membership Life Cycle.

[Critique and Connections]
The chapter seems somewhat dated. "Visitors centers" and GeoCities were so late 90s. :)

Like Brian, I can't say that I agree with Kim's rigid classification of roles in the Membership Life Cycle. Kim seems to be missing some of the finer details about how online communities differ from real communities. For example, the costs of entering and leaving are much lower online, and consequences for bad behavior can be minimal. Her insistence on using these analogies distracts me from the points she's trying to make.

[Description]
In this chapter Kim takes a detailed look at the role of leaders in an online community. She begins with a few words of caution that are still relevant today: know that your leadership requirements will change over time. A flexible approach to designating leaders in an online community is essential.

Kim outlines a leadership pyramid, a set of levels (regulars -> leaders -> elders) through which leaders in an online community will progress. She distinguishes four types of leaders in an online community: enthusiasts, volunteers, contractors, and staff. Some sort of membership ritual separates the official from unofficial leaders.

[Description]
Powazek asserts that an emergent online community has to have content before it can cultivate a healthy community. He also lists several guidelines for content creators: know thy audience, open up to your readers with personal anecdotes, don't be rude, don't exclude, and be honest about conflicts of interest and news of interest to the community.

An interview with Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter rounds out the chapter. Powazek probes Haughey's motivations for creating MetaFilter, his strategies for creating and sustaining interactions between community members, and issues the site faces (scale, moderation, and topic variety).

As mentioned in several entries prior to mine, Frankel lists three principles that protect human subjects in online research experiments:
1) autonomy: participants must be treated as autonomous agents
2) beneficiance: maximizing benefit to the subject while minimizing harm
3) justice: distribution of the burdens of the research is fair, such that certain participants do not experience disproportionate burden (or benefit)

I was particularly interested in the discussion of identity deception, both on the part of participants and researchers. This type of research online would be some combination of the second and third types of qualitative research listed by Eysenbach. Frankel advises against deceptive research online, noting that the debriefing would be especially difficult to administer if the researcher was using deceptive techniques.

Trek, Erika, and Nika wrote excellent summaries of Kraut's article and raised several interesting questions. Instead of re-hashing a description of the article, I'd like to address some of their questions in this space.

Trek asked about sampling: do larger samples work to negate the biases of an internet user-based sample? I have very little experience conducting online experiments, other than the occasional web-based survey. My own feeling is that researchers ought to be awfully careful if they intend to generalize results from a set of data obtained from internet users. As Kraut mentioned, internet users are more likely to be young and white. I don't think a larger sample would balance demographic biases, though perhaps a sample biased against these known demographic trends could work to alleviate those biases (in much the same way younger voters were weighted more heavily in surveys before the 2004 election because they were less likely to use a land-line telephone).

[Description]
The authors cite three different types of qualitative research of online communities:
1) "Passive analysis": researchers not involved in the actual community
2) "Active analysis": researchers participate in communications
3) Researchers clearly identified as researchers and perform research activities openly in the community

The decision whether to obtain informed consent is a factor of how public the researcher believes the communication to be. In addition to how public the communication medium is, researchers must consider how the people communicating think about their communications--do they understand how publicly they are communicating? The authors offer three considerations for researchers evaluating the perceived level of privacy in a community:

[Description]
Third place: "people's own remedy for stress, loneliness, and alienation" (Oldenberg, 20). Oldenberg enhances (generalizes?) his definition of the third place as one marked by the quality of escape -- a place that invites comparison to other places, that is marked by "its differences from the other settings of daily life" (Oldenberg, 22).

Third places are characterized by:
- Neutral ground: "where individuals come and go as they please" (22)
- Leveling: "an inclusive place... accessible to the general public and does not set formal criteria of entrance and exclusion" (24)

[Description]
Wellman asserts that computer networks are facilitating connections between people and groups in ways that illustrate the "inherently social" nature of the technology.

Wellman discusses two ways in which the social nature of networking technology impacts the way people use computer technologies. First, he looks at community networks both online and off. Wellman delineates several forms of the debate as to whether the internet has enriched or damaged the notion of community. I plan to try to remember these four forms on p. 2032, as I think they're excellent descriptions of pitfalls to avoid when thinking about how the internet changes human behavior.

Preece states some clear definitions of what constitutes an online community in this article. Her working definition claims that an online community needs four elements: 1) People; 2) A shared purpose; 3) Policies; 4) Computer systems.

I agree that these are four essential ingredients. Preece's article does not discuss what proportions are important, whether some online communities can survive with less or more of one of these, or what factors most strongly contribute to sustaining the community. I'm sure the answer to those questions varies with the nature and purpose of the online community.