[Air-L] Death/Migration of an online community

[Mia Consalvo]

hi all,

I'd also recommend Celia Pearce's work on the community that surrounded Uru,
the brief-lived MMO based on the Myst world. When those servers shut down
she tracked the 'homeless' community in their quest to find a new place to
stay and their feelings about the changes that occurred. Here's one link to
some of her work on the topic:

http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/PearcePubs/PearceSP-Final.pdf<http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/%7Ecpearce3/PearcePubs/PearceSP-Final.pdf>
.

Also, the work of Anthony Papargyris and Angeliki Poulymenakou in a recent
issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research investigates a guild that
was in another MMO that shut down (Earth & Beyond), and what happened when
they switched to a new virtual world:

http://www.jvwresearch.org/v1n3_papargyris_poulymenakou.html

best,
Mia

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Derek Hansen <shakmatt at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have my students read Derek Powazek's chapter on Killing a
> Community, which is a nice read from a practitioner's perspective.
>
> Derek
>
> On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 8:04 AM, Warren Allen <wsa25 at drexel.edu> wrote:
> > Ruth, if you haven't already discovered them, you might find some
> > value ethics-wise in the following:
> >
> > Bruckman, A. (2006). Teaching Students to Study Online Communities
> > Ethically. Journal of Information Ethics, 15(2), 82-98.
> >
> > Hudson, J. M., & Bruckman, A. (2004). " Go Away": Participant
> > Objections to Being Studied and the Ethics of Chatroom Research. The
> > Information Society, 20(2), 127-139.
> >
> > ~Warren
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 3:47 AM, ruth <ruth at ruthdeller.co.uk> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>  Hi everyone
> >>
> >> Yesterday, the owner of a large online fan community that I'm on the
> >> fringes of announced that he was closing the site, and this has caused a
> >> lot of uproar as the membership (41,000, with 16,000 active posters) are
> >> dealing with the news and looking at what to do next).  It'll make a
> >> fascinating study to look at how the community deals with the
> transition,
> >> but I was wondering about the permissions involved for such research:
> the
> >> forum rules state posters' words are their own and can't be reproduced
> >> without their permission, which is fine, but in such cases where there's
> a
> >> site owner, is it best practice, or even essential, to go to them first
> >> and then ask the posters?
> >>
> >> (The same is likely to apply to the forums they migrate to)
> >>
> >> Thanks
> >>
> >> Ruth
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > Warren Allen
> > Drexel iSchool Research Assistant
> > warren.allen at ischool.drexel.edu
> > AIM/Twitter/G: iSchoolWarren
> > _______________________________________________
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-- 
Mia Consalvo, Ph.D.
School of Media Arts & Studies
(formerly the School of Telecommunications)
Ohio University
9 South College Street
Athens, Ohio 45701
USA

740.597.1521