Hello everyone!

My name is Filip, and I'm relatively new to this forum, but have been playing on KGS for over a year now. I'm a student at DePaul University conducting research on KGS's online community, and am required to conduct interviews with KGS users who wish to help me and my group with this task.

The point of our research is part of a class known as "Virtual Worlds/ Online Communities" at DePaul University. Our research is to answer the question of whether KGS does or does not bring in social capital, and the biggest portion of our research is interviewing individuals who are users on KGS that we don't know personally. The information/ insight we will acquire from individuals we've interviewed will be used in a research paper which the members of our group are currently working on. By law, any audio we retrieve during this interview after the appropriate notes have been recorded will be destroyed. The topics of focus consist of:

- History of Go and KGS,
- Behavioral Patterns in the community,
- Design of the website and interface,
- and KGS Bots.

These interviews would be conducted on Skype, or if you live in the Chicagoland area or Naperville and would rather have a face-to-face interview, I would be more than glad to arrange for that.

This research is being conducted under strict regulations by the IRB and DePaul University. I have attained the proper IRB certification to conduct these interviews, and the identity of anyone who wishes to participate in this interview will remain completely anonymous. If you so request to see our certificates of certification, I will be glad to show you. If you'd like more information on IRB certification, you can read more here: http://extranet.fhcrc.org/EN/sections/iro/irb/310.html

I understand if you don't want to participate in this interview, because there's a good chance I'm not trusted as a user on this forum due to my experience. I would be willing to give any information require to "trust" me as user, and not see me as a bot, trolls, etc. (I'd give you my phone number or Facebook URL if you so needed it for proof.)

Trust on websites is usually something that takes time to achieve, but unfortunately, time is against me and my group. Using this forum for possible interviews is more of a last resort for us and a blind lead given to me by a friend who wanted to help us out. I've also attached a form which gives more information about our research and anyone you would want to contact to "prove" that we are in fact conducting a legitimate research.

If you would like to participate in an interview to help with my research, it would help me and my group get the grade to succeed in this class. please email me at filiplatocha14@gmail.com. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Filip

Filip, I'm happy to help.

Hi Filip,

I'd be willing to help as well - I'll shoot you an email.

Might be a good idea to also interview someone who isn't a KGS admin.

Thank you so much Ed! Would you like to shoot me an email so I can give you some more information and perhaps schedule a time to conduct the interview with you? My email is filiplatocha14@gmail.com

Filip, you can also just send me a private message here. Thanks.