Quality Evaluation of Electronic Communication Fora with evalYOUate

Communication is an essential and necessary aspect of professional work in science and business. Besides the traditional face to face communication more and more face-file-face communication is used in newsgroups, email, or communication fora. We introduce a index number system to evaluate the benefit of communication fora. We distinguish the overall quality of communication fora into five areas: information, interaction and communication, presentation, organizational and social, and technique and method. With evalYOUate, an internet-based tool to support the evaluation, we studied 29 communication fora in the German speaking countries. Results show big differences between the fora and that especially the middle range is often weak in the information level.