As governments increasingly adopt digital tools, public service chatbots have emerged as a growing communication channel.This paper explores the design considerations and engagement opportunities of public service chatbots, using a 311 chatbot from a metropolitan city as a case study.Our qualitative study consisted of official survey data and 16 interviews examining stakeholder experiences and design preferences for the chatbot.We found two key areas of concern regarding these public chatbots: individual-level and community-level.At the individual level, citizens experience three key challenges: interpretation, transparency, and social contextualization.Moreover, the current chatbot design prioritizes the efficient completion of individual tasks but neglects the broader community perspective.It overlooks how individuals interact and discuss problems collectively within their communities.To address these concerns, we offer design opportunities for creating more intelligent, transparent, community-oriented chatbots that better engage individuals and their communities.

Given the renewed attention on politics, values, and ethics within our field and the wider cultural milieu, now is the time to take stock of social justice research in HCI. We surveyed 124 papers explicitly pursuing social justice between 2009 and 2022 to better reflect on the current state of justice-oriented work within our discipline. We identified (1) how researchers understood the social justice-relevant harms and benefits, (2) the approaches researchers used to address harm, and (3) the tools that researchers leveraged to pursue justice. Our analysis highlights gaps in social justice work, such as the need for our community to conceptualize benefits, and identifies concrete steps the HCI community can take to pursue just futures. By providing a comprehensive overview of and reflection on HCI’s current social justice landscape, we seek to help our research community strategize, collaborate, and collectively act toward justice.

Design activism is a way for designers and researchers to negotiate societal inequities and resulting implications for design practices. Within HCI and design, community-based methods are a common way to situate design engagements among those directly impacted by social inequities. Despite its potential for social impact, current approaches to design activism can be extractive and at odds with community-aligned advocacy. Drawing on interviews with 32 individuals who use design to address local, social inequities, we extend the current discourse around design activism by exploring 'activist-led design'. We outline four key considerations of this work: understanding activist-led design practices; relationality and community engagements; challenges of doing this work; and democratizing access to design. Our analysis highlights implications for academia's role in design activism. This paper interrogates design activism's role as a social and communal practice, and considers ways to support activist-led design. We propose considerations that contribute to the larger conversation of academic design having more equitable impact.

Domestic violence (DV) survivors from marginalized communities face serious challenges when seeking governmental services and community resources. Current resources often overlook victim-survivors' needs, neglecting their choices and autonomy. Through studying the context of DV within the US-based Muslim community and embracing a Survivor-Centered Transformative Justice approach, we introduce healing structures, structures promoting justice for victim-survivors and their communities, where healing is promoted by tackling harmful practices and discriminatory laws and fostering collective and survivor-centered interventions. Through focus groups, design concepts, and expert evaluations, we unveil three sociotechnical processes that establish healing structures for survivors and their communities when implemented collectively and simultaneously. The processes are: 1) Survivor advocacy, ensuring safety, empowerment, informed decision-making, and care continuity. 2) Community accountability, encouraging reparation and behavioral change of abusers through communal intervention and support. 3) Institutional transformation, reshaping broader conditions perpetuating abuse through preventive measures and structural reform. We conclude by reflecting on healing structures and discussing their design implications and potential tensions.

While domestic violence (DV) is prevalent in all socioeconomic settings, identity highly impacts how one experiences and recovers from abuse. This work examines US-based Muslim women’s challenges when seeking help and healing from domestic violence. Through participatory interviews with 23 participants within the DV ecosystem, we find that victim-survivors’ autonomy is compromised throughout the abuse, within their immediate communities, and when involving the criminal justice system. To address such harms, we adapt a survivor-centered transformative justice (SCTJ) approach, a framework to discern individual and systemic harm, to understand how to design alongside victim-survivors, and to focus on victim-survivors’ autonomy. We explain under what conditions an SCTJ approach may be productive for designers. We use insights from our interviews to highlight intervention areas for reducing harm, repairing harm, and promoting healing for victim-survivors. Lastly, we offer guidelines to design for harm reduction, accountability, and systemic change.

Online self-presentation is recognized as a global phenomenon largely influenced by and sensitive to users’ cultural norms. However, incorporating cultural understanding into the design process can be challenging. Designing for culture creates dilemmas between designing for a pre-existing cultural ‘status quo’ or for cultural change. We argue that culturally sensitive design should not be a tool for (i) perpetuating existing cultural inequalities or (ii) empowering the individual isolated from their wider cultural milieu. We propose “designing for culturally sensitive cultural change”—a process in which we support creating a trajectory departing from the status quo, to bridge the gap between people's aspirations and practices related to cultural change. We demonstrate this in a case study on designing for Saudi women's self-presentation in digital media. We conclude with reflections on cultural sensitivity in designing for cultural change and broader implications for HCI.

Why do social computing projects aimed at alleviating social inequality fail? This paper investigates this question through a qualitative interview study with 25 individuals working to address the problem of wage theft in the United States (US) context. Our analyses uncover failures at three levels or scales of interaction: one, failures at the individual level of technology adoption; two, relational failures (i.e., the anti-labor worker/employer dynamic in the US); and three, institutional or macro-level failures. Taken together, these various failings point to larger, structural forces that negatively fate pro-labor projects’ trajectories – i.e., capitalism. Capitalism's incarnations in the US play a significant and at times harsh grip in steering the path of social computing design projects. In this paper, we untangle the relationship between capitalism and social computing, providing an analytic framework to tease apart this complex relationship, the lessons learned from our empirical data, as well as ways forward for future, pro-labor, social computing projects.

Early recovery after substance use disorder (SUD) treatment is a period of high risk. The majority of people will relapse, often within weeks of completing treatment. In the modern era, re-entry upon completion of treatment includes both digital and non-digital spaces. Digital spaces, including social media, present unique challenges to the recovery journey. However, research has rarely focused on this critical period and the ways in which technology affect it. We conducted in-depth interviews with 29 participants (8 recoverees and 21 support professionals) across two treatment sites to explore this gap. Using an inductive thematic approach, we gained insights into digital social re-entry, a term that we introduce to describe the process of re-engaging with social spaces online. We describe the work of digital social re-entry, which includes 1) remaking social networks, 2) maintaining boundaries, 3) managing triggering content, 4) resisting access to substances, and 5) shifting personal identity. We conclude by characterizing strategies for navigating digital social re-entry and discussing ways to better support recoverees during this aspect of their recovery journey.

Past CSCW work has examined the role of temporal rhythms in cooperative work and has identified alignment work--the work required to bring dissonant rhythms into alignment--as an important aspect of large-scale collaboration. We ask instead how individual workers interact with temporal rhythms to sustain the conditions that make their work possible--not aligning rhythms, but attuning them. This paper draws on interviews with farmer-knowledge workers, people who engage with both farm work (the work of growing food or raising animals for food, on a commercial or non-commercial basis) and computer-based knowledge work. We identify three ways that farmer-knowledge workers interact with natural and structural rhythms to construct sustainable work-lives: anchoring (tying oneself to a particular rhythm to create accountability and structure), decoupling (loosening or cutting ties with a rhythm to create flexibility), and gap-filling (interweaving complementary rhythms to create balance). Together, these practices constitute attunement work.

As job-seeking and recruiting processes transition into digital spaces, concerns about hiring discrimination in online spaces have developed. Historically, women of color, particularly those with marginalized religious identities, have more challenges in securing employment. We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with Muslim-American women of color who had used online job platforms in the past two years to understand how they perceive digital hiring tools to be used in practice, how they navigate the US job market, and how hiring discrimination as a phenomenon is thought to relate to their intersecting social identities. Our findings allowed us to identify three major categories of asymmetries (i.e., the relationship between the computing algorithms' structures and their users' experiences): (1) process asymmetries, which is the lack of transparency in data collection processes of job applications; (2) information asymmetries, which refers to the asymmetry in data availability during online job-seeking; and (3) legacy asymmetries, which explains the cultural and historical factors impacting marginalized job applicants. We discuss design implications to support job seekers in identifying and securing positive employment outcomes.

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are characterized by an inability to decrease a substance use (e.g., alcohol or opioids) despite negative repercussions. SUDs are clinically diagnosable, hazardous, and considered a public health issue. Sponsorship, a specialized type of peer mentorship, is vital in the recovery process and originates from 12-step fellowship programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA). To investigate sponsorship relationship practices and to identify design opportunities for digitally-mediated peer support, we conducted 27 in-depth interviews with members of AA and NA. We identified five key sponsorship relationship practices relevant for designing social computing tools to support sponsorship and recovery: 1) assessing dyadic compatibility, 2) managing sponsorship with or without technology, 3) establishing boundaries, 4) building a peer support network, and 5) managing anonymity. We identify social computing and digitally-mediated design opportunities and implications.

This paper provides insight into the use of data tools in the American labor movement by analyzing the practices of staff employed by unions to organize alongside union members. We interviewed 23 field-level staff organizers about how they use data tools to evaluate membership. We find that organizers work around and outside of these tools to develop access to data for union members and calibrate data representations to meet local needs. Organizers mediate between local and central versions of the data, and draw on their contextual knowledge to challenge campaign strategy. We argue that networked data tools can compound field organizers' lack of discretion, making it more difficult for unions to assess and act on the will of union membership. We show how the use of networked data tools can lead to less accurate data, and discuss how bottom-up approaches to data gathering can support more accurate membership assessments.

While domestic abuse is an all too common experience for women worldwide, how people experience the abuse and their resources to deal with the abuse differ. In this qualitative, interview-based study, we examine Saudi women's domestic safety concerns living in Saudi Arabia and the United States. Based on non-Western Islamic feminist views of agency, we identify three key practices, focused on how women resist or deal with their domestic violence. For each practice, we highlight how interwoven cultural, religious, and political contexts impact Saudi women's ability to recognize and deal with domestic abuse. We attend to technology's role in enabling or hindering women's agency. These practices include: 1) recognizing abuse, where women identify abusive situations, 2) managing abuse, where women find ways to cope with ongoing or anticipated abuse within their constraints and resources, and 3) seeking non-abusive futures, where women decide how to mitigate the abuse or leave their abuser. Given domestic violence's complicated nature, we highlight several key design recommendations based on women's values.

Recent years have seen increased investment in data-driven farming through the use of sensors (hardware), algorithms (software), and networking technologies to guide decision making. By analyzing the discourse of 34 startup company websites, we identify four future visions promoted by data-driven farming startups: the vigilant farmer who controls all aspects of her farm through data; the efficient farmer who has optimized his farm operations to be profitable and sustainable; the enlightened farmer who achieves harmony with nature via data-driven insights; and the empowered farmer who asserts ownership of her farm's data, and uses it to benefit herself and her fellow farmers. We describe each of these visions and how startups propose to achieve them. We then consider some consequences of these visions; in particular, how they might affect power relations between the farmer and other stakeholders in agriculture--farm workers, nonhumans, and the technology providers themselves.

Dancer-teacher communication in a ballet class can be challenging: ballet is one of the most complex forms of movements, and learning happens through multi-faceted interactions with studio tools (mirror, barre, and floor) and the teacher. We conducted an interview-based qualitative study with seven ballet teachers and six dancers followed by an open-coded analysis to explore the communication challenges that arise while teaching and learning in the ballet studio. We identified key communication issues, including adapting to multi-level dancer expertise, transmitting and realigning development goals, providing personalized corrections and feedback, maintaining the state of flow, and communicating how to properly use tools in the environment. We discuss design implications for crafting technological interventions aimed at mitigating these communication challenges.

Game jams, which are game creation events in which developers design and build a game over a short period of time, have been shown to support participatory, active STEM learning. Game jams have expanded from their origins as physically co-located experiences and many are now conducted exclusively online. Though the co-located game jam has been noted as educational, little is known about how learning happens within online game jams. To better understand the ways online game jams support self-development, we interviewed fifteen online jam participants about their learning experiences during their jams. Additionally, we observed and analyzed several jams using activity theory. We found that online game jams support participants' learning through extensive feedback from others during and after the jam. Such feedback sessions were a key social and participatory learning elements for online jams, providing much-need social support. In contrast to the group-focused development in offline jams many participants in our study chose to develop games alone. Many individuals participated in online game jams regularly, treating them as a broader experience than singular events. We use these findings to discuss how we might better design for self-directed learning online and offer suggestions on how to better attune online game jams to the needs of participants.

At the same time that workers' rights are generally declining in the United States (US), workplace computing systems gather more data about workers and their activities than ever before. The rise of large scale labor analytics raises questions about how and whether workers could use such data to advocate for their own goals. Here, we analyze the historical development of workplace technology design methods in CSCW to show how mid-20th century labor responses to scientific management can inform directions in contemporary digital labor advocacy. First, we demonstrate how specific methodological tendencies from industrial scientific management were adapted to work in CSCW, and then subsequently altered in crowd work and social computing research to more closely resemble industrial approaches. Next, we show how three tactics used by labor unions to strategically engage with industrial scientific management in the mid-20th century can inform data-driven worker advocacy in platform-mediated work. Finally, we discuss how this history shapes our understanding of worker participation and the implications of using worker data for contemporary advocacy goals.

This paper examines how mobile technology impacts employee accountability in the blue-collar data-driven workplace. We conducted an observation-based qualitative study of how electricians in an electrical company interact with data related to their work accountability, which comprises the information employees feel is reasonable to share and document about their work. The electricians we studied capture data both manually, recording the hours spent on a particular task, and automatically, as their mobile devices regularly track data such as location. First, our results demonstrate how work accountability manifests for employees' manual labor work that has become data-driven. We show how employees work through moments of transparency, privacy, and accountability using data focused on location, identification and time. Second, we demonstrate how this data production is interdependent with employees' beliefs about what is a reasonable level of detail and transparency to provide about their work. Lastly, we articulate specific design implications related to work accountability.

Proponents of data-driven policing strategies claim that it makes policing organizations more effective, efficient, and accountable and has the potential to address some policing social criticisms (e.g. racial bias, lack of accountability and training). What remains less understood are the challenges when adopting data-driven policing as a response to these criticisms. We present results from a qualitative field study about the adoption of data-driven policing strategies in a Midwestern police department in the United States. We identify three key challenges police face with data-driven adoption efforts: data-driven frictions, precarious and inactionable insights, and police metis concerns. We demonstrate the issues that data-driven initiatives create for policing and the open questions police agents face. These findings contribute an empirical account of how policing agents attend to the strengths and limits of big data's knowledge claims. Lastly, we present data and design implications for policing.

In the digital age, social media has become a popular venue for nonprofit organizations to advocate for causes and promote social change. The 2016 United States Presidential Election occurred amidst divisive public opinions and political uncertainties for immigrants and immigration policies were a frequently-contested debate focus. Thus, this election provided an opportunity to examine nonprofit organizations' social media usage during political conflicts. We analyzed social media posts by immigrant-focused nonprofit organizations and conducted interviews probing into how they managed their online presence and social relations. This study finds that these nonprofit organizations adopted three key strategies to support their target community: 1) disseminating content about immigration-related issues and policies; 2) calling for participation in collective endeavors to influence the political climate; 3) engaging in conversations with outside stakeholders including political actors, media, and other organizations. We use empowerment theory, which has been used widely to study marginalized populations, as a theoretical lens to discuss how NPOs' social media usage on Twitter reflects their endeavors to bring information and calls to action to immigrant communities. We, then, present design opportunities to amplify the advantages of social media to help nonprofit organizations better serve their communities in times of political upheavals.

Live streaming-an emerging practice of broadcasting video of oneself in real time to an online audience-is often used by people to portray themselves engaged in a craft such as programming. Viewers of these 'creative streams' gather to watch the streamer at work and to interact with the streamer and other audience members. However, little is known about how creative streamers engage with their audience, how their viewership communities form and operate, and how creative streams may support learning. In this study, we used a participant-observer method to study game development streams on the live streaming site Twitch.tv. We found that live streams support the growth of learning-focused communities that mentor both the streamer and each other during and after streams. We show the influence of streamers in creating a space for learning and motivating learners. Finally, we discuss implications for online education and communities of practice.

Drawing from fieldwork of 14 small food farms in the Midwest, we describe the on-the-ground, practical challenges of doing and communicating sustainability when local food production is not well-supported. We illustrate how farmers enact learned and honed tactics of sustainability at key sites such as farmers' markets and the Internet with consumers. These tactics reveal tensions with dominant discourse from government, Big Ag, and popular culture. The success of these tactics depends on farmers having fortitude--control, resilience, and the wherewithal to be exemplars of sustainability. In our discussion, we highlight how the local farmers' social movement work constitutes loosely organized small groups connecting others to an amorphous idea of a sustainable society--one that sustains an environmental, economic, local, cultural, and physical way of life. Using Fine's concept of tiny publics, we identify design opportunities for supporting this less directed kind of social movement.

Nearly 40 million workers in the USA, a third of the working population, are low-wage, meaning they make less than $11.65 per hour. These workers face the pervasive and detrimental challenge of wage violations, also known as wage theft, which is any illegal activity by an employer that denies benefits or wages to employees. We interviewed 24 low-wage workers who experienced wage theft and sought justice about their work practices, challenges, and information technology usage. Based on these interviews, we identify three key sociotechnical practices these workers engaged in to address their wage theft: 1) identifying wage and payment discrepancies; 2) tracking and documenting work; and 3) pursuing wage claims. Seeking to leverage HCI research to interrupt uneven social, economic, and information relations in the low-wage workplace, we ultimately reflect on the possibility and limits of several key design recommendations.

Most social media platforms are persistent in nature, enabling users to re-visit content at their discretion. Platforms with design features that support ephemeral communications, such as Snapchat, have become increasingly popular. During the course of our empirical study, we interviewed 15 Snapchat users about their experiences and practices. Our data reveal that Snapchat users experienced different types of loss, including media, meaning, and context loss, and developed workarounds to deal with those losses, including preemptive action and collaborative saving practices. Our findings revealed a conflict between the user's expectation of the affordance the ephemeral platforms would provide, and the actions user's followed.

Virtual pet games, such as handheld games like Tamagotchi or video games like Petz, provide players with artificial pet companions or entertaining pet-raising simulations. Prior research has found that virtual pets have the potential to promote learning, collaboration, and empathy among users. While virtual reality (VR) has become an increasingly popular game medium, litle is known about users' expectations regarding game avatars, gameplay, and environments for VR-enabled pet games. We surveyed 780 respondents in an online survey and interviewed 30 participants to understand users' motivation, preferences, and game behavior in pet games played on various medium, and their expectations for VR pet games. Based on our findings, we generated three user types that reflect users' preferences and gameplay styles in VR pet games. We use these types to highlight key design opportunities and recommendations for VR pet games.

In this paper, we examine how activist organizations, focused on human rights violations (HRVs) in Mexico, obtain and translate data to produce actionable insight for social change. Through interviews with 15 participants working in think tanks, human rights centers, non-governmental organizations, and nonprofit organizations, we identified two key data challenges that impact their work: absent and conflicting data. We then describe how these nonprofits try to understand these issues by building alliances to address specific, detrimental knowledge and data gaps. Next, we articulate how these activists use data to work towards social change by informing citizens, requesting action, and building capacity. Lastly, we propose recommendations on how to design for HRVs-focused data practices, focusing on issues related to addressing technology and infrastructure constraints, designing for safety, and supporting community data collection and dissemination.

In recent years, many HCI designers have begun pursuing research agendas that address large scale social issues. These systemic or "wicked" problems present challenges for design practice due to their scope, scale, complexity, and political nature. In this paper, we develop a social justice orientation to designing for such challenges. We highlight a breadth of design strategies that target the goals of social justice along six dimensions -- transformation, recognition, reciprocity, enablement, distribution, and accountability -- and elaborate three commitments necessary to developing a social justice oriented design practice -- a commitment to conflict, a commitment to reflexivity, and a commitment to personal ethics and politics. Although there are no easy solutions to systemic social issues, a social justice orientation provides one way to foster an engagement with the thorny political issues that are increasingly acknowledged as crucial to a field that is not just about technological possibility, but also about political responsibility.

Digital artifacts on social media can challenge individuals during identity transitions, particularly those who prefer to delete, separate from, or hide data that are representative of a past identity. This work investigates concerns and practices reported by transgender people who transitioned while active on Facebook. We analyze open-ended survey responses from 283 participants, highlighting types of data considered problematic when separating oneself from a past identity, and challenges and strategies people engage in when managing personal data in a networked environment. We find that people shape their digital footprints in two ways: by editing the self-presentational data that is representative of a prior identity, and by managing the configuration of people who have access to that self-presentation. We outline the challenging interplay between shifting identities, social networks, and the data that suture them together. We apply these results to a discussion of the complexities of managing and forgetting the digital past.

Traditional face-to-face social interactions can be challenging for individuals with autism, leading some to perceive and categorize them as less social than their typically-developing peers. Individuals with autism may even see themselves as less social relative to their peers. Online communities can provide an alternative venue for social expression, enabling different types of communication beyond face-to-face, oral interaction. Using ethnographic methods, we studied the communication ecology that has emerged around a Minecraft server for children with autism and their allies. Our analysis shows how members of this community search for, practice, and define sociality through a variety of communication channels. These findings suggest an expansion in how sociality has traditionally been conceptualized for individuals with autism.

Social computing technologies, such as social networking sites (SNSs), often privilege people who fit within expected, static categories. Thus, users embarking on major identity changes, such as gender transition, often encounter stress when using SNSs to interact with their online social networks. To address this problem and reflect on the design of SNSs and other social computing systems, we present the results of a comprehensive online survey of transgender and gender non-conforming SNS users. Our findings indicate that although Facebook can be a stressful place for gender transition due to difficulties of transition disclosure, support from one's Facebook network can help to mitigate some of this stress. We examine Facebook both as a site of stress and as a site of support. Better understanding the relationships between stress, disclosure, and support on SNSs for these particular users can inform technology design that will benefit people who struggle with navigating a wide range of major identity changes online.

The use of online games and virtual worlds is becoming increasingly prominent, particularly in children and young adults. Parents have concerns about risks their children might encounter in these online spaces. Parents dynamically manage the boundaries between safe and unsafe spaces online through both explicit and implicit means. In this work, we use empirical data gathered from a digital ethnog-raphy of a Minecraft server, Autcraft, to explore how par-ents of children with autism continually create a "safe" virtual world through both implicit and explicit means. In par-ticular, we demonstrate how their actions in these spaces define and produce "safety," shedding light on our theoreti-cal understanding of child safety in online spaces.

This paper extends research on the giving and inheriting of digital artifacts by examining social network site accounts post-mortem. Given the important role that social network sites play in online bereavement practices, we conducted a series of in-depth qualitative interviews to explore issues around inheritance and post-mortem data management of Facebook accounts. We found that participants focused less on ownership of the data, and instead on the duties and potential conflicts associated with maintaining an account post-mortem. Subsequently, we argue for 'stewardship' as an alternative to inheritance for framing post-mortem data management practices. Analysis of post-mortem data management activities highlights how stewards are accountable and responsible to the deceased and various survivors. However, weighing competing responsibilities is complicated by varied relationships with disparate survivors, as well as the inability to consult with the deceased. Based on our findings, we claim that post-mortem solutions need to account for the needs of stewards in addition to those of the deceased and survivors. We suggest that a model of stewardship better accounts for the interpersonal responsibilities that accompany online data than inheritance alone.

In this paper, we describe results from fieldwork conducted at a social services site where the workers evaluate citizens' applications for food and medical assistance submitted via an e-government system. These results suggest value tensions that result - not from different stakeholders with different values - but from differences among how stakeholders enact the same shared value in practice. In the remainder of this paper, we unpack the distinct and conflicting interpretations or logics of three shared values - efficiency, access, and education. In particular, we analyze what happens when social services workers have ideas about what it means to expand access, increase efficiency, and educate the public that conflict with the logics embedded in the e-government system. By distinguishing between overarching values and specific logics, we provide an analytic framework for exploring value tensions as values are enacted in practice.

In this article, we present the results of a study examining challenges related to access and trust for nutrition assistance outreach workers and suggest design implications for these challenges. Outreach workers are e-government intermediaries who assist clients with accessing and using e-government online applications, systems, and services. E-government intermediaries are not typical end users; they use e-government systems on behalf of clients, and as such their challenges differ from those of primary users. We detail social and technical aspects of these challenges to develop a nuanced understanding of access and trust in the ecosystems surrounding e-government systems. First, we describe how the practical accomplishment of access involves multiple stakeholders, actors, and practices. Second, we highlight how trust emerges through the e-government intermediaries’ work to project themselves as professional and competent through their technical practice. Last, we propose design implications sensitive to both the social and technical aspects of these challenges.

Based on an 18-month qualitative study that included the creation and testing of design considerations and a prototype location-based information system (LBIS), this research provides empirical insight into the daily practices of a wide variety of individuals working to address food insecurity in one U.S. county. Qualitative fieldwork reveals that nonprofit organizations in the food assistance ecology engage in location-based information practices that could be enhanced by the design of a LBIS. Two practices that would benefit from a collaborative LBIS are 1) practices of matching in which nonprofit workers help individuals who are seeking assistance to food resources and 2) practices of distribution in which nonprofit workers help organizations access and deliver food resources to clients. In order to support such practices across organizations the cooperative design component of this research suggests that an LIBS should: support the role of intermediaries who engage in practices of matching and distribution; provide interactive mapping tools that match resources to need; enable organizations to control visibility over specific data; and document work and impact. This research further suggests that designers should explore the wide variety of spatial patterns that must align and overlap such that ecologies of nonprofit organizations might synergistically work together to address pressing social needs.

In this paper, we present the results of a study of the work practices of food assistance outreach workers. We introduce the construct of service mediation, which includes the technical, social, and knowledge labor practices involved in enabling access to and use of an e-government service. We explore the service mediation activities of outreach, technological assistance, providing knowledge, and ongoing engagement. These activities bring to light how successful service relationships involve fostering a process, bridging relationships, and providing broader scaffolding. The results of our research highlight the role service mediation plays in the use of services and service technologies in information-rich organizations. This research extends previous conceptualizations of mediation by documenting how mediators support broader service processes for their clients, transform potential beneficiaries into clients, and engage in long term assistance. Therefore, this work moves beyond prior conceptualizations of mediation that concentrate solely on enabling access and use of specific technologies.