On Friday 14 November 2008, Stuart Geiger wrote:
specific protocols and techniques. Most importantly, I have to get the permission of my university's Institutional Review Board before I begin this research, and they require that I perform a good amount of ethical "due diligence" with the community beforehand.
As did I. I basically divided the problem in two categories: pre-existing public communications, and non-public communications (emails/discussions), as I explain in my "Exempt Justification Statement":
[[ This research is concerned with the development and understanding of the collaborative culture of the Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. I will rely upon public communications which I will cite as publications. "At risk" populations are not relevant or necessary to my research though it is possible they are present in the population at large even if not perceptible as such. (Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and has been edited by thousands.) Any nonpublic communication, such as clarifications from or conversations with sources, if used, will be attributed according to the source's preferred identity (their online identity, which may or may not be personally identifiable, or a made-up identity of my choosing). No citation on my part of existing public documents can expose a source to liability or harm; citation of non-public information is very unlikely to expose sources to harm and will be governed by consent. Consequently I am requesting exemption under 4 (citation of existing documents) and 2a (non-sensitive nor harmful "interviews" (non-public communications)). ]]
For any non-public statements, in terms of risks and procedures I wrote:
[[ For any non-public communications, the only risk to the source is that someone could find out what he or she said to me. To avoid this risk, I will keep conversation private and confidential unless he or she gives me permission to use the conversation (see below). ... Any non-public communications will consist of oral or e-mail conversations between the source and myself. I do not expect an oral conversation to last more than an hour or email to exceed more than three or four rounds, but this is at the source's discretion. If I am not present to administer this consent form in person I will refer the source to an online copy prior to our discussion and ask for an e-mail agreement. No incentives are provided. ]]
It further helped that I was not focussing on "sensitive" issues with "at risk" populations.
You can see my discussion of this in the Methods/Ethics section(3.2) of my dissertation proposal, which addressed "questions to ask when undertaking Internet research" as compiled by the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Ess et al. 2002). http://reagle.org/joseph/2006/disp/proposal.html#heading26 and my on-line consent form is still available: reagle.org/joseph/2006/disp/9-consent-form.html