Community-Engaged Design and Implementation of a Framework for Ethical Online Communities Research

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This award supports a team of researchers who will work with members and organizers of five representative online communities to create an ethical framework to guide future research on online spaces. The overarching goal of the project is to repair and prevent ethical breaches, and to acknowledge and mitigate potential community-level harms of future investigations in a way that honors the priorities and voices of members and organizers of online communities. To work towards this goal, the team will implement their framework to create actionable guidelines for a variety of stakeholders, including other researchers, IRBs and ethics boards, online communities, and educational institutions The framework will also be used to train the next generation of computing professionals through curricular integration, to help online communities to develop "Terms of Research'' pages for their sites, and to inform future research through dissemination to researchers and university ethics review boards.The research team will follow a three-phase process for the development, validation, and implementation of a new framework for guiding research on online communities. The first phase will create an initial framework by employing participatory and community-engaged approaches to center the voices of members and organizers of several critical online communities (Linux, Wikipedia, InTheRooms, CaringBridge, and r/EDAnonymous) as representative cases of diverse community structures, purposes, and priorities. In phase two, the investigators will refine and disseminate the initial framework through workshops with researchers in four most relevant research communities and assess the framework based on its descriptive, rhetorical, inferential, and application power. In the last phase, the team will focus on implementing their new framework in a variety of ways indicated in the previous paragraph. In each phase, outcomes will be assessed and refined through an iterative process with online community members and organizers and by an independent advisory committee of ethics experts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.