The Impact of Social Types within Information Communities: Findings from Technical Newsgroups Tammara Combs Turner Karen E. Fisher Microsoft Research The Information School One Microsoft Way University of Washington Redmond, Washington 98052 Seattle, Washington 98195
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract communities or newsgroups—Usenet discussion forums for publicly exchanging threaded messages. Lee, Vogel We explored whether Fisher and Durrance’s [11] and Limayem [24] define an online community as, “a framework of information communities applies to online technology-supported cyberspace, centered upon technical newsgroups and the impact of particular social communication and interaction of participants, resulting in types on information flow within digital economy. Data a relationship being built up.” While “community” has collection methods included content analysis of discussion been defined in many different ways [8, 19, 20, 27, 28], threads from six technical newsgroups over an eighteen the study of online communities—and specifically the month period, along with focus groups, participant flow of information within them are relatively new. observation and interviews with key informants, and Broadly encompassing newsgroups, forums, analysis of quantitative data obtained from Microsoft conferences, and bulletin boards, [33] online communities Research’s Netscan project. Findings support and expand occur “when users are given tools to use their voice in a the information communities framework. Four social public and