Research is scarce on how direct and indirect support seeking strategies affect support exchange in online health communities. Moreover, prior research has relied mostly on content analysis of forum posts at the post level. In order to generate a more fine-grained analysis of support exchange, we conducted content analysis at the utterance level, taking directness of support seeking, quality of provision, forum type, and seeker gender into account. Our analysis of four popular online support forums for people living with human immunodeficiency virus found that type of support sought and provided, support seeking strategy, and quality of emotional support provision differed in care provider/formal forums versus social/informal forums. Interestingly, indirect support seeking tended to elicit more supportive emotional responses than direct support seeking strategies in all forums; we account for this in terms of type of support sought. Practical implications for online support communities are discussed.

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Notions of the smart city look to mobilize information technology to increase organizational efficiency, and more recently, to support new forms of community engagement and involvement in addressing municipal issues. As cities turn to civic enterprise technology platforms, we need to better understand how that class of system might be positioned and used to collaborate with informal community-born coalitions. Beginning in 2019, we undertook an embedded collaborative research project in Albany Georgia, a small rural city, to understand three primary research questions: (1) How do community organizing practices take shape around joint initiatives with local government? (2) What data, tools, and process are needed to support those initiatives? (3) How do the affordances of City-run enterprise platforms support such community-born initiatives? To develop insight into these questions, we deployed a mixed-methods study that interwove participant observation, qualitative fieldwork, and participatory workshops. From this, we point to several mismatches that arose between the assumptions of a managed enterprise environment and the complex needs of establishing and supporting a multiparty community coalition.