Knowledge sharing, maintenance, and use in online support communities

Abstract

All rights reserved 2007ii For Maren iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI am deeply appreciative of the many individuals who have helped shape this dissertation and continually encouraged me throughout its writing. I hope that each of them feels some sense of shared ownership of this work and is pleased to be associated with it. Although I can't mention everyone by name, a few are worth special notice.I owe much to my advisor Paul Resnick, who has played an instrumental role in my education since the day I showed up at SI. I appreciate his early confidence in my abilities as I transitioned into the doctoral program and his continual expectations of excellence. He has been a tireless champion, reviewer, and source of insight throughout.He is one of the few truly interdisciplinary researchers I know and has a keen way of getting to the heart of any issue. Perhaps more than anything, I appreciate his personal integrity and willingness to impartially consider all sides of each issue.I also appreciate the insights provided by my committee members. I have benefited greatly from Mark Ackerman's enthusiasm for my work and guidance in performing effective interviews and textual analysis. I also appreciated his comments on papers we co-authored and insights into the publication process and academic life more generally. I hope that at least some of his many insights into the social world have bled into this work and my own thinking. I am thankful for my association with Soo Young Rieh who has introduced me to the world of information behavior research through our IBTheory group discussions. Her curiosity and openness to new ideas is contagious.Caroline Richardson has been a constant source of personal encouragement since I worked with her my first year at SI. She has been my window into the medical arena and has helped me think more broadly about the implications of my work. their knowledge with one another on a particular topic of interest. These communities cover nearly every topic imaginable ranging from cancer treatment to website design to auto repair. These help-based communities fill a unique niche in the information landscape by sharing information that is difficult to come by in books, manuals, coworkers, and other information resources. They provide access to rare expertise and cover material in great depth. They also provide access to peers with similar experiences and concerns who are able to empathize and provide social support. Because these communities are interactive, their content can be clarified, peer reviewed, and customized to meet individuals' personal needs. LIST OF TABLESOne of the great things about online community conversations is that they can be "overheard" by others. This enables the knowledge that is made explicit through the ongoing discussion to benefit far more individuals than the discussion's immediate participants. The value of community conversations as a secondary resource is attested to by the large percentage of lurkers in online communities and the popularity of archived conversations (e.g., pub...

Visualizing Threaded Conversation Networks: Mining Message Boards and Email Lists for Actionable Insights

“…As threaded conversations become embedded within more complex social spaces with multiple interaction technologies, it is increasingly important to understand how they all interact. For example, Hansen found that technical and patient support groups benefit from combining a threaded conversation (i.e., email list) with a more permanent wiki repository [12]. The Ravelry example showed strategies that have not yet been widely used by the research community to understand how network position relates to use of other tools (i.e., blogs) or activities (i.e., projects).…”

“…There are a handful of administrators who keep the conversation friendly and encourage contributors to follow the guidelines. See [12] for a complete description of the community and some of the strategies they use that make them so effective.…”

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work

“…Participation is highly skewed: a small percentage of experts typically answer the majority of questions that are posed by a large number of novices (e.g., [11,12]). To help limit repeat questions, most help-based communities encourage newcomers to check discussion archives, FAQs, or community repositories before posting questions [9,11,12,14].…”

“…These can be used to provide personalized recommendations through the use of recommender systems (e.g., [17]). Alternately, visualization techniques can be used to provide context around conversations [9,18]. This can be useful in helping newcomers locate relevant messages and understand some of the social context around a message (e.g., it is sent from a frequent poster and is the 4th of 16 messages in the thread).…”

“…This work is part of a larger 2-year empirical study [9]. The community, css-d, consists of website designers interested in using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a technology used to add style (e.g., fonts and spacing) to structured web documents (e.g., HTML or XML documents).…”