Concepts and Tools for Web-based Community Building

Abstract

This research project explores a new approach to online community building and community health promotion. It is based on the concept of salutogenesis. Salutogenesis is a proactive approach to community health promotion which seeks preventative measures based around social, cultural and natural activities. This is in stark contrast with the traditional reactionary corrective and curative culture of public health care. The main aim of this thesis is the identification of the key salutogenic community building processes. The objective is to materialize the design criteria to develop a comprehensive community building tool which may be used for salutogenic community health promotion. The other objective of this research is the synthesis of the salutogenic Sense of Coherence (comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness), together with the criteria for community building (collaboration, planning and defining). An incentive for pursuing a philosophical line of inquiry is the adaptation of process philosophy into a coherent conceptual framework for epistemological objectivity. Process philosophy as an analytico-synthetic tool is a departure from traditional research paradigms because it does not posit a world of objects, like substance ontology. Process ontology offers rich insight into social practices since they are analytical processes. In spite of its clear and commonsensical intelligibility and enormous exegetic capacity, process ontology or action-based world views remain largely unexplored in Information Design (ID). My contribution is two-fold; the identification of generic salutogenic community building processes and the adaptation of process ontology into a conceptual framework for an analytico-synthetic methodology. This thesis is explanatory account of the salutogenic community building processes at a fundamental level and a non-composition, non-substance semantico-ontological framework is put to use. This research is based two qualitative surveys. The first is a preliminary survey about the extant online communities and tools, and the second is based on data collected in a 9 month ethnographic study of the pratices of a Norwegian-based non-government organization involved in community health promotion.