Collaborative Information Seeking in an Online PoliticalGroup Environment

In this paper, we present a framework for examination of group formation and information exchange on a Facebook Group, “Join the Coffee Party Movement”, that was created in response to the Tea Party Movement in the US. The stated goals of “Join the Coffee Party Movement” are to establish a place for otherwise disenfranchised individuals to share information and engage in productive dialogue and to develop solutions for problems facing the USA. Similar movements exist in other countries and social networking technology has been utilized to further the ideology and mobilize supporters of various national and international causes. Since its inception in January 2010, over 300,000 Facebook members have become followers of the Coffee Party. The Group’s page has over 155,000 discussion comments to official postings. Preliminary analysis of this dialogue suggests two intertwined avenues for investigation. First, it is clear that the Coffee Party Facebook page represents one virtual group through which many different virtual subgroups emerge from online discourse. Second, the groups that are emerging do so as a consequence of having a shared information need, which is fulfilled to some extent through participation in this group. These groups exhibit a certain type of completely online collaborative information behavior that we think warrants investigation from multiple perspectives. How members of online groups like these collaboratively seek information is of importance for this workshop; but we believe our broader perspective will be of interest.