This week I have been focusing on the community groups in a forum called Weight Weenies as you may have noticed!!!! I mentioned it on the discussion board and Jen said I needed to think about ethical issues around using a information from a private groups discussion “because people involved may have an expectation of privacy, that means not having their words or activities studied or published without their knowledge.”

I signed up as a member and had planned to post a question as mentioned in participation post on blog. I began to question what actually is the community and by posting do I actually become part of the community?

This is a further development from last weeks summary about being part of a community, I still do not feel part of this community and just by posting a comment I don’t think this will make me feel included.I began to question the idea that there is a particular amount of times I need to post to become a member or is it about the number of times I interact that make me become part of the community?

The site appears to have an answer – it values the number of posts – In the rules on sales a member has to have made 30 posts before they are allowed to advertise something for sale

How did they come up with this rule?
How did they come up with the number?
Did they check up on people?
What was the majority of the 30 postings about?

Although this may well be a problem in other forums, this doesn’t appear to be an issue here. There have been posts about what bike do you have and people have listed bikes,put photo’s online of their bike.

People have also posted questions on what was your first bike and some have written and some have photo’s and some have photo’s from Google but have actually said it is not their actual own bike.

With regard to the weight issue, people have sent in a stream of photo’s of their bike components on scales – I think the authenticity here is not in question.

However, there are people who have been deleted as they have a duplicate account. I cannot see the benefit in having two accounts, but I also cannot see why this would be problematic for the site administrators and that they would choose to delete their accounts

Hine, C (2000) The virtual objects of ethnography, chapter 3 of Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. pp41-66