A Framework for Exploring Relationships Between Online Community Characteristics and Regulation Principles

In this paper, we explore a framework for researching relationships between community characteristics and regulation principles. Different regulation principles are supported by different website features. Ultimately, our goal is to help community operators to deepen the appreciation of their community sites by providing empirically validated insights which website features might support their online community best. We first determined which community characteristics and regulation principles should be considered, based on a literature search. We then analyzed 31 Dutch and English, national and regional online newspaper communities. Analysis showed some interesting relationships between individual community characteristics and regulation principles. The framework was able to discriminate between two types of community as well, on the basis of our data, but could not relate these types to (sets of) different regulation principles. We will therefore suggest some improvements of our framework.