Katerina, If youre looking at USENET newsgroups, you might want to take a look at the social accounting search engine NetScan at http://netscan.research.microsoft.com. I successfully used the muscle of their automated newsgroup participation statistics for a recent study I performed; Discussing Our Family Trees: Finding Community-Based Communication in Genealogical Newsgroups. I used the Common Ground Model of Whittaker, Terveen, Hill, and Cherny (1998), and the Online Community (OC) Model of Scoberth, Preece, and Heinzl (2003), to test for online community the NetScan database statistics worked fabulously well (though I did also use some manually collated stats for some specific OC tests). I studied four years of data for the newsgroup in my study, which had over 123,000 posts during that period. Regards Kylie Veale | Brisbane, Australia GradDipInvEnv, MInetStds [2003] email: kylie@veale.com.au www: http://casa.de.veale.com.au www: http://www.veale.com.au/kylie -----Original Message----- From: air-l-admin@aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin@aoir.org] On Behalf Of Katerina Sent: Wednesday, 3 December 2003 1:42 AM To: air-l@aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] how to measure participation rates As part of my study of an online community I have to measure the participation rates among participants, in a way similar to Nancy Baym's in her classic study of the r.a.t.s online community. From my participation and observation of this particular community so far, it is obvious to me that most of the messages are contributed by a small group of heavy users. However, I need to quantify it, measure it and present it as a table containing percentages of posters and posts contributed. My question is how can I do it? What is the method of measuring these rates? Does it simply consist in noting down how many messages each member writes? Prima facie that may look like an easy procedure but once starting to do it it turns out to be extremely difficult since this online community is made up of more than 20 conferences each one comprising more than 50 different topical discussions. Overall the number of messages written every week is enormous. Any ideas on how I can measure overall participatio rates of such an environment? Thank you, K. Diamantaki