Posted by muffled on July 8, 2007, at 12:01:09
In reply to Re: i think we need to drop it.......he's going to, posted by fayeroe on July 8, 2007, at 11:21:34
*This is very clear...
He is the owner.
He has ALL the power here...
He can choose to listen...
or NOT...
:-(
I love babblers...
But I am REALLY NOT happy bout this...
:-(
M
Ownership: Rights and responsibilities
Editor--Eysenbach and Till [1] are right to call attention to the potential difficulties of studying online communities. An underlying problem in many of their examples is that of ownership. Those who provide the mailing lists or Web sites on which online communities are based "own" those communities and have the right to set their goals. When outsiders, even ones with academic credentials, introduce their own agendas, conflict is not surprising.
One solution is for investigators to establish their own communities. As owners, they would then have the right to make research a goal. They would also, of course, have the responsibility of conducting that research ethically.
I host such a community, Psycho-Babble, and have employed two forms of prospective informed consent. The first was implicit. The main and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages informed members that a condition of posting messages was allowing me unrestricted use of them, for example, elsewhere on the site or in articles. The FAQ also reminded them that -- regardless of how private they felt the community was -- their messages would be public. I wrote an article describing the community [2] and made it available on the site, and the response was largely positive. Currently, prospective informed consent is explicit. My Institutional Review Board has approved the project and a disclosure statement, and I have added an official "agreement to consent" that individuals can accept by clicking a button.
Robert C Hsiung, MD
Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry
Department of Psychiatry
University of Chicago
5737 S. University Ave.
Chicago, IL
60637-1507
USA
poster:muffled
thread:767523
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20070702/msgs/768423.html