Collaboration in Online Communities: Information Processing and Decision Making

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/112401

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item type: Item ,
    Signals that Matter: Gender, Content Framing, and Engagement in Online Communities of Practice
    (2026-01-06) Gunarathne, Priyanga; Aljafari, Ruba; Ayabakan, Sezgin; Khader, Samer; Kulaç, İbrahim
    As social media evolves into a core venue for professional interaction and knowledge exchange, understanding what drives engagement in online communities of practice remains a crucial area of inquiry. This study examines how gender and content framing jointly influence peer engagement in an online physician community (i.e., pathology community) on X. Analyzing 2,467 patient case tweets using matched sampling and negative binomial random-effects models, we find that content authored by female physicians receives more favorable engagement than content authored by male physicians. Engagement also varies by content framing: diagnostic challenges and curbside consultations elicit more replies than mere shares. Female physicians benefit more from sharing less cognitively demanding content, while gender differences diminish for complex cases. These findings highlight the decision dilemma professionals face when framing knowledge contributions and reveal how identity signals and content strategies jointly shape engagement in online communities of practice, offering both theoretical and practical insights.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item type: Item ,
    From Code to Commerce: Open Source Software Firms as Double Agents of Collective Innovation Strategy
    (2026-01-06) Taherizadeh, Amir; Banik, Marc; Marsan, Josianne
    This study develops a grounded theory of collective innovation strategy, explaining how open source software (OSS) firms, enterprise clients, and developer communities collaboratively shape OSS innovation. Drawing on a year-long participant observation, 46 interviews, and document analysis, we identify four interrelated constructs: collective strategy impact, client effect, OSS firm’s dual fiduciary obligation, and community holistic leadership. We show that enterprise clients, while often latent, can enhance innovation process when two enabling conditions are met: fiduciary mediation by the OSS firm and holistic leadership within the community. The OSS firm’s double-agency role reduces resources and information asymmetries between online developer communities and arm’s-length clients, enabling joint decision-making that balances technical and commercial priorities. In addition, holistic community leadership further sustains alignment and engagement across distributed actors. Our findings extend relational view of the firm and resource-based theories by revealing how external actors become strategic resources only when mobilized through situated practice.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item type: Item ,
    Explicit and Implicit Help-Seeking in Navigating Support Needs on Social Media: A Case Study of Domestic Violence Community
    (2026-01-06) Zhou, Lina; Roy, Bikramjit; Schroeder, Grace; Zhang, Dongsong; Langhinrichsen-Rohling, Jennifer
    Social media platforms offer a supportive environment for help-seeking and collaborative problem-solving. Despite extensive research on help-seeking behavior, it has largely overlooked the role of explicitness-implicitness in the request for help, particularly to meet users’ support needs. This study aims to address this gap by investigating how needs for informational support versus emotional support are associated with explicit versus implicit help-seeking behavior in social media self-disclosure. We further examine how these behaviors impact community agreement (i.e., peers’ acknowledgement and supportive feedback). We propose and test hypotheses using data collected from representative social media communities focused on domestic violence, and the findings support most of our hypotheses. This work contributes to online help-seeking theory, including work on motivational interviewing, and provides practical insights for fostering community support.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item type: Item ,
    Negotiating Voice and Privacy: Doctoral Students’ Perspectives on Participatory Information Systems
    (2026-01-06) Gardasevic, Stanislava; Estell, Pamela; Desiato , Caterina; Lamba, Manika
    This paper presents the results of a Value-Sensitive Design study to develop a participatory information system that supports student progress through a PhD program. We engaged over thirty PhD students and alumni over three iterative design phases comprising semi-structured interviews and participatory design workshops. The study elicited categories for collecting and sharing crowdsourced information and labels for privacy levels. Findings show that the collected information was valuable, particularly critical for new students' decision-making, and provided insights otherwise unavailable. Additional findings revealed privacy concerns over information sharing, how different privacy labels might affect voicing versus silence, as well as the credibility of participatory systems. Privacy concerns emerged to be significantly different among domestic (US) versus international students, which informed our user personas generation. We conclude by providing design recommendations for online systems in higher education that support student voicing.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item type: Item ,