Investigating the Adoption of Local Online Communities

While Internet researchers have largely investigated worldwide information sharing, less attention has been paid to the effect of the Internet on how place-based communities share locally relevant information. My PhD work aims to provide a deeper understanding of the interplay of communities' characteristics and systems' design decisions that affects the adoption, sustainability and impact of local online information systems. My research combines analysis of neighborhoods' publicly available data, user surveys and interviews, content analysis of archival online data, and field experiments. In my dissertation, I will investigate e-Democracy.org, which is one of the oldest and most sustainable attempts to provide virtual spaces for neighborhoods