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Online community research routinely poses minimal risk to individuals, but does the same hold true for online communities? In response to high-profile breaches of online community trust and increased debate in the social computing research community on the ethics of online community research, this paper investigates community-level harms and benefits of research. Through 9 participatory-inspired workshops with four critical online communities (Wikipedia, InTheRooms, CaringBridge, and r/AskHistorians), we found researchers should engage more directly with communities' primary purpose by rationalizing their methods and contributions in the context of community goals to equalize the beneficiaries of community research. To facilitate deeper alignment of these expectations, we present the FACTORS (Functions for Action with Communities: Teaching, Overseeing, Reciprocating, and Sustaining) framework for ethical online community research. Finally, we reflect on our findings by providing implications for researchers and online communities to identify and implement functions for navigating community-level harms and benefits. 

While online community research is prevalent in CSCW, there are limited ethical principles for conducting research that may affect online communities. At the same time, a growing body of evidence suggests that traditional ethical review focused on research with individuals fails to fully capture the complexities of online community research. To support advancing ethical online community research, we propose a one-day hybrid workshop centered around tensions and challenges in adopting best practices for ethical online community research. This workshop aims to bring together online community researchers to 1) recognize existing approaches for ethical online community research, 2) expose gaps in current practices, and 3) prioritize directions to reconcile these ethical challenges. 

Strategies for engaging in more ethical research with online communities