Dana Salter and I are giving a paper at CSSE on Monday about new literacies research and ethical considerations.  We decided to do some thinking about this topic after realizing we were having difficulties figuring out how to gain the “free and informed consent” of members of online communities.  Two good resources we’ve been using in our writing of this paper are this document located on the Tri-Council Policy Statement website and this book by Heather Kitchin.