Shopping for an online patient forum? Read about the Francophone online diabetes community poster presented at Doctors 2.0 & You

How would someone choose an online community to join, in for example, diabetes? We applied this question to the Francophone web world as a study theme for one of our two poster entries at Doctors 2.0 & You 2012.

To download the poster, click here.

Using Google to search for active online diabetes communities, we found 4 dedicated sites and 9 portal sites that include a Francophone diabetes community. 10 of the 13 are based in France.

While portal sites including diabetes communities were generally established as businesses and dedicated sites, the work of volunteers or not for profits, this did not lead to quality differences per se.

One portal site, Carenity.com based in France, does present a distinguishing feature, the offer of self-monitoring web tools to community members.

No generalizable distinguishing characteristics emerged from our study, which lead us to the (obvious) conclusion that forum and community managers should make a greater effort to differentiate their "offer" and explain to potential members why that community should be of interest. 

Also, at a minimum, forum producers should provide easily accessible activity data to members.