Knowledge sharing, maintenance, and use in online support communities

Abstract

Widespread adoption of collaborative authoring tools (such as Wikis) by online communities has fostered new ways of stonng, shahng, maintaining, and using community knowledge. My dissertation research examines the effect and potential use of these shared knowledge repositones within online technical and medical support communities using short-term ethnography (including content analysis and interviews), surveys, and quantitative analysis of behavior traces. I characterize the key technological mechanisms, and the processes and social norms at pay. I then use this knowledge to propose best practices and novel social and technical designs.