The chapter describes the basic tenets of online communities, their typology and their fundamental elements with a view of informing ways in which people can get to participate online, something that those individuals or organizations dealing with e-governance initiatives also aim at. A key consideration is the importance of socializing as an ingredient that motivates individuals and which can offer them a degree of freedom to discuss government related matters.
With half of the world already connected to the Internet, we are facing a growing amount of information available online, that is expected to increase exponentially in the following years. Educational environments are transitioning from closed structures to open, collaborative environments, using technology to build virtual classrooms. In this paper we present a customized crawler dedicated to alternative knowledge building environments used for potential community inquiry, that is unique in its power to combine data extraction and indexing capabilities that facilitate discourse-driven community network analysis integrated into the ReaderBench framework. ; This study is part of the RAGE project. The RAGE project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644187. This publication reflects only the author's view. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
For community managers and hosts it is not only important to identify the current key topics of a community but also to assess the specificity level of the community for: a) creating sub-communities, and: b) anticipating community behaviour and topical evolution. In this paper we present an approach that empirically characterises the topical specificity of online community forums by measuring the abstraction of semantic concepts discussed within such forums. We present a range of concept abstraction measures that function over concept graphs - i.e. resource type-hierarchies and SKOS category structures - and demonstrate the efficacy of our method with an empirical evaluation using a ground truth ranking of forums. Our results show that the proposed approach outperforms a random baseline and that resource type-hierarchies work well when predicting the topical specificity of any forum with various abstraction measures.
Last June, a group of Italian MPs proposed jail terms and fines for authors of so-called "pro-ana" (anorexia) and "pro-mia" (bulimia) websites. These are self-styled online communities on eating disorders which are viewed as promoting extreme dieting and unhealthy eating practices. France and the United Kingdom preceded Italy's attempt to pass restrictive legislation as far back as 2008-9, and many internet service providers also endeavoured to ban these contents.
The increase of computer-mediated communication use and the aging population has led to a renewed interest in online communities and social networks for active aging and social support in daily living. However, a systematic understanding of the design recommendations in Senior Online Communities is still lacking in scientific documentation. The aim of this paper is to identify the design recommendations used in online communities that support active aging. In addition, this paper highlights some of the benefits of using online communities by older adults. Twenty-three papers published between January 2015 and May 2020 in English-language, peer-reviewed publications, met inclusion criteria. The review presents a set of recommendations for designing online communities to enhance older adults' social interactions. A process that aims for "engagement" is suggested to strategically guide the design of Senior Online Communities: Interacting – Sense of Belonging (Role-playing, Storytelling, and Legacy) – Engaging. ; This work was supported by the research project SEDUCE 2.0 - Use of Communication and Information in the miOne online community by senior citizens, which includes the SERIOUSGIGGLE project and the game JUMP. The SEDUCE 2.0 project is funded by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., COMPETE 2020, Portugal 2020 and European Union, under the European Regional Development Fund, POCI-01-0145-FEDER-031696 SEDUCE 2.0. ; published
Part 4: Critical Reflections ; International audience ; While Online Communities (OCs) are increasingly used to involve people in organizations and societies, few studies focus on how OC influence political decision making within eParticipation initiatives. This issue is explored through an interpretive case-study of the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S), a mass-size eParticipation political initiative recently founded by private citizens. The use of OCs is a common strategy to involve groups of people to easily connect on-line, cooperating on common and shared interests. We here focus on understanding the internal and external forces influencing on the OCs, to better understand how to manage such OCs within the eParticipation domain. We do so by introducing the concept of tensions, to describe the states that these contrasting forces produce on the OCs, addressing the research question: what tensions occur in OCs for eParticipation? Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of the OCs phenomenon within the eParticipation domain, while also provides avenues for further research.
New models of peer governance are emerging from online communities in the Global South. This is visible in an understudied case of ridesharing "platforms" created on social media communities and materializing in Latin American cities. In this article, I investigate these online communities in different cities of Colombia and how they develop peer governance models. A particular focus is paid to developing organization forms that do not follow the typical structure of firms. In these communities, I study the relationships between members, community managers, and the governance rules they create, while illuminating the hierarchies present, the accountability of their administrators, and its legitimacy. The emerging literature on platform cooperativism, platform urbanism, and peer governance is used to structure a way to understand this new phenomenon with its "southern" particularities. Moreover, in-person and online qualitative research methods are incorporated to engage with the elusive nature of these structures. This will be one of the first studies engaging with the peer governance dilemmas emerging from online communities in the Global South. An analysis on what the platform literature and the institutional ecosystem in developing countries can harness from the particularities of these community-platforms as they evolve in these contexts is also included.
Part 5: Techniques and Analysis ; International audience ; Policy decisions in governmental models are often based on their perception and acceptance in the general public. Traditional methods for harvesting opinions like telephone or street surveys are time intensive and costly and direct interaction between a governmental member and the population is limited. Social media harbor the chance to easily get a high number of opinions and proposals in form of poll participation or interactive debate contributions.Especially debates about political topics can generate data which are hard to interpret because of its length and complexity. We propose a collection of methods to support a decision maker in gaining an overview over textual debates coming from several social media to save time and effort in manual analysis. Our approach enables an efficient decision making process by a combination of automatic topic clustering, sentiment analysis, filtering, and search functionalities aggregated in a graphical user interface. We present an implementation and a use case proving the usefulness of the proposed methodologies.
Online communities are used across several fields of human activities, as environments for large-scale collaboration. Most successful ones employ professionals, sometimes called "community managers" or "moderators", for tasks including onboarding new participants, mediating conflict, and policing unwanted behaviour. Network scientists routinely model interaction across participants in online communities as social networks. We interpret the activity of community managers as (social) network design: they take action oriented at shaping the network of interactions in a way conducive to their community's goals. It follows that, if such action is successful, we should be able to detect its signature in the network itself. Growing networks where links are allocated by a preferential attachment mechanism are known to converge to networks displaying a power law degree distribution. Growth and preferential attachment are both reasonable first-approximation assumptions to describe interaction networks in online communities. Our main hypothesis is that managed online communities are characterised by in-degree distributions that deviate from the power law form; such deviation constitutes the signature of successful community management. Our secondary hypothesis is that said deviation happens in a predictable way, once community management practices are accounted for. If true, these hypotheses would give us a simple test for the effectiveness of community management practices. We investigate the issue using (1) empirical data on three small online communities and (2) a computer model that simulates a widely used community management activity called onboarding. We find that onboarding produces in-degree distributions that systematically deviate from power law behaviour for low-values of the in-degree; we then explore the implications and possible applications of the finding. ; This paper has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688670
2019 Summer. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; The 2017 Women's March on Washington marked a significant moment in contemporary U.S. political history as hundreds of thousands of women gathered on the National Mall in an expression of embodied dissent. Key women's movement groups, Pantsuit Nation and the Pussyhat Project, operated as powerful collectives in the time leading up to the 2016 presidential election and the subsequent 2017 Women's March. Their transition from sites of rhetorical secrecy to embracing the strategic publicity of the 2017 Women's March illuminates how ego-function, reversed symbolism, and consciousness raising impact social movements in our digital age. To understand how social movement groups navigate rhetorical secrecy and strategic publicity, this thesis explores how the ego-functional responses of Pantsuit Nation and the Pussyhat Project led to the deployment of specific rhetorical tactics to cultivate collective identities. I argue that the transitionary process from rhetorical secrecy to rhetorical publicity allows collectives to legitimate and orient themselves as key political actors. This thesis also calls scholars to mindfully attend to the ramifications digital technologies have on our understandings of rhetorical strategies and structures, particularly as they pertain to contemporary social movements.
This study aims to reveal patterns of e-petition co-signing behavior that are indicative of the political mobilization of online "communities". We discuss the case of We the People, a US national experiment in the use of social media technology to enable users to propose and solicit support for policy suggestions to the White House. We apply Baumgartner and Jones's work on agenda setting and punctuated equilibrium, which suggests that policy issues may lie dormant for periods of time until some event triggers attention from the media, interest groups, and elected representatives. In the case study presented, we focus on 21 petitions initiated during the week after the Sandy Hook shooting (14–21 December 2012) in opposition to gun control or in support of policy proposals that are alternatives to gun control, which we view as mobilized efforts to maintain stability and equilibrium in a policy system threatening to change. Using market basket analysis and social network analysis we found a core group of petitions in the "support law-abiding gun owners" theme that were highly connected and four "communities" of e-petitioners mobilizing in opposition to change in gun control policies and in favor of alternative proposals.
