Lost in Migration: Information Management and Community Building in an Online Health Community

The ever-growing volume of information within online health communities (OHCs) presents an urgent need for new solutions that improve the efficiency of information organization and retrieval for their members. To meet this need, OHCs may choose to adopt off-the-shelf platforms that provide novel features for information management, but were not specifically designed to meet these communities’ needs. The questions remain, however, as to the impact of these new platforms on social dynamics within OHCs and their well-being. To examine these questions, we qualitatively studied a migration of a popular OHC, focusing on diabetes self-management, between two off-the-shelf social computing platforms. Despite improving information management, the migration served as a catalyst to reveal the importance of features for identity management and closed circle communication that were not apparent to either the management or the membership of the community. We describe the study and draw implications for research and design for OHCs.