The Internet supports a large variety of communication patterns through technologies such as e-mail, list servers, instant messaging, discussion forums, and now increasingly through blogs, social networking sites, and wikis. These technologies give rise to many diverse types of online communities engaged in various social, economic and political activities. Although, these communities have been studied from various angles, no widely accepted typology for categorizing the different types of communication has emerged, which would reflect their fundamental characteristics.

The purpose of the research was to increase our understanding of the nature and effects of a special type of online communications that the literature calls "deliberative", which has recently received increasing attention from a growing variety of scholars including political theorists and computer scientists. It is distinguished from other forms of communication in that deliberators have a willingness to change their judgments and preferences based on the force of the better argument rather than coercion or manipulation during the course of their interactions.

The notion of deliberative communication derives from the conceptual framework provided by Searle's Speech Act Theory and Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action. We derived our theoretical approach in this study from these social action theories and their subsequent application to law and democracy. The derivation aimed at transferring abstract macro-societal concepts selectively to a more concrete level, which is appropriate for the study of online sites where deliberative communications exist.

To achieve its goals of exploration and understanding, this study applied cyber-ethnographic methods to data collection and discourse analytical methods for analysis. The results of this analysis support the idea that deliberative communications play a vital role in coordination and collaboration in online environments that are relatively free of hierarchical and monetary constraints. The study concluded with some reflections on the possible implications for the design of ICT applications that support deliberative communications.