Beyond Information: Developing the Relationship between the Individual and the Group in
Online Communities
Robert Kraut
1
, Xiaoqing Wang
2
, Brian Butler
3
, Elisabeth Joyce
4
and Moira Burke
1
1
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
2
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
3
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
4
Edinboro University
Edinboro, PA 16444
April 18, 2008
Acknowledgments:
We thank Zoe Ouyang, Kenneth Chan, and David J. Housman for research assistance; Marc A. Smith at
Microsoft Research and David Jeske at Google for providing data; Carolyn Rosé, Jaime Arguello, Cam-
eron Williams and William Cohen at Carnegie Mellon University for advice about text and content analy-
sis; and Kimberly Ling for helpful feedback and discussion throughout the process of conducting this
search. This research is supported by NSF grant IIS-0325049.