Context Matters: Ethical Challenges in Research with Online Communities
Context Matters: Ethical Challenges in Research with Online Communities
While online community research is prevalent in CSCW, there are limited ethical principles for conducting research that may affect online communities. At the same time, a growing body of evidence suggests that traditional ethical review focused on research with individuals fails to fully capture the complexities of online community research.
To support advancing ethical online community research, we propose a one-day hybrid workshop centered around tensions and challenges in adopting best practices for ethical online community research.
This workshop aims to bring together online community researchers to:
Recognize existing approaches for ethical online community research
Expose gaps in current practices
Prioritize directions to reconcile these ethical challenges.
Submission Deadline: August 1, 2025 August 11th, 2025
Notification of acceptance: August 20, 2025
Workshop: October 19, 2025
We invite researchers from all backgrounds to submit a position paper reflecting on how their research context shapes the approaches, methods, and ethical considerations they bring to online community research.