The restaurant industry has become increasingly reliant on digital technologies for business operations, digital marketing, and promotion, especially amid and after the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper presents the findings of a two-year study exploring how women- and minority-owned restaurants in Chicago and Detroit encountered and overcame digital challenges in their day-to-day operations, across a range of levels of digital skills and literacy. Drawing from semi-structured and impromptu interviews with restaurant owners (n= 47) and participant observation, we apply HCI literature on infrastructuring and patchworking to highlight how restaurateurs’ experiences often run counter to the assumptions of a "typical" user. Indeed, they often must build and leverage their—offline and online—networks of support to overcome failing infrastructures, both within the restaurant industry and on digital platforms. Concurrently, we emphasize the importance of community building and social infrastructuring to overcome these challenges while also building up alternative networks of resources for their communities, especially considering identity-related inequalities and amid a global moment of crisis.

Professional writing skills are essential for crafting job application materials where applicants showcase their qualifications to recruiters and employers. Lettersmith is a digital tool that supports writing through scaffolded annotation, an instructional approach combining an expert-informed checklist, annotated examples, and self-tagging. We evaluated the efficacy of the instructional mechanisms that make up scaffolded annotation, as well as the use of ChatGPT, in facilitating writing cognitive processes and writing quality. Through a lab experiment with 146 first-year college students writing and revising a cover letter, we found that the combined mechanisms of scaffolded annotation within Lettersmith promoted a stronger understanding of the writing genre. Specifically, the use of a checklist combined with another writing support, like an example or self-tagging, was particularly effective for improving writing quality. Unstructured use of ChatGPT did not improve writing cognitive processes or writing quality more than Lettersmith.

Work is increasingly shifting away from traditional full-time jobs toward more fragmented ways of working, like gig work and part-time jobs. Yet, employment platforms like LinkedIn often privilege those with traditional credentials and work histories, presenting barriers to those who possess little experience translating informal experiences into a format that such tools expect. To address this gap, we propose a narrative-based approach that enables individuals to recognize transferable skills and practice articulating them verbally and in writing via a group discussion setting. Through a participatory design workshop held in a public housing community, we demonstrate how a cultural-probe and persona-inspired activity can elicit self-reflection, enabling individuals to communicate their strengths. While prior HCI research has highlighted the critical need for reflection in the job search process, little work has been done to facilitate this reflection and translation into employment profiles. Our work addresses this call and informs new design directions for employment technologies.

This paper critically examines the design practices of platforms like DoorDash that promise to deliver convenience to consumers' doorsteps within minutes.Based on ethnographic observations in DoorDash dark stores and qualitative interviews with DoorDash workers, we find that instant delivery platforms have several workand customer-specific impacts due to how platforms govern space and broader geographies.These platforms computationally remap city spaces to reorient and accelerate the flow of goods and people across them, subsequently exacerbating intra-urban disparities in access to food and groceries.Such centralized surveillance and management of space is made possible through hyper-quantified labor processes that severely limit worker agency inside dark stores and intensify working conditions.Furthermore, minute-tracking of worker output and mobilities, and their hyper-quantified evaluations eclipse much of the invisible work that sustains the veneer of instant deliveries.In arguing for a worker-centered design of gig platforms and their service delivery models, we end with three crucial dimensions that critical design researchers and platform designers need to account for when making things 'convenient.'

This article theorizes and proposes a novel construct, community digital capacity , to measure collective digital capacity at a community level. Community digital capacity is the extent to which the culture, infrastructure, and digital competence of family and community enable and support digital practices. We address a critical gap in individual digital literacy assessments and address limitations with existing theories that do not show digital inequities in the context of underlying systemic and structural challenges posed by one's social position. Building on insights from Computer Supportive Cooperative Work and Social Computing and Human-Computer Interaction for Development communities, we recognize that digital training initiatives must shift toward critical cultural and social practices that encourage full participation in community affairs. Accordingly, we created 28 items covering three domains---individual, social, and infrastructure. We conducted cognitive interviews with a public housing community to refine the items and capture the construct fully. We assessed their factor structure in two Southeastern Michigan cohorts. After dropping eight items based on contribution to Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR), the public housing residents exhibit a two-factor structure (SRMR=0.09) consisting of nearly independent factors for the individual and social domains, with all items loading positively on their respective domain. We contribute an initial measure for researchers and practitioners to assess community members' access to shared digital resources and support, offering a tool to assess broader social and structural factors contributing to the digital divide.

Digital skills are essential for engaging in employment, healthcare, education, and government services. However, the digital divide remains a social inequality, especially among marginalized populations. Through a community-engaged research approach, we conducted a digital skills learning intervention in a U.S. public housing community, where residents frequently face socioeconomic challenges and limited access to digital resources. Public housing is a community seldom explored in CSCW and HCI research and provides a unique context to study the ongoing digital skills gap. Through the lens of situated learning theory, we study how sociocultural factors impact the efficacy of a community-based computer skills learning intervention. Specifically, we examine how the public housing community organized various resources---online learning materials, instructors, peer social support, and on-the-job learning opportunities---for digital skills development. Notably, the training leveraged instructor critical care and peer support to develop a learning community between residents and leaders of the community NGO that continued beyond the formalized training program. We contribute to CSCW and HCI work on collective and assets-based approaches to enhancing digital capacity. Our work provides implications for building collective grassroots digital skills learning infrastructure that could create new digitally-engaged employment opportunities.

Assets-based approaches emphasize the importance of leveraging and building upon community strengths. We describe how a community-based digital capacity building program, Community Tech Workers (CTW), addresses the goals of assets-based development by hiring local residents and students to serve as tech support personnel for underserved minority small business owners in Detroit. Through interviews and observations, we examine how reciprocal relationships between tech workers and small business owners are critical to the success and sustainability of the program. We find that tech workers and business owners mutually benefit by 1) building confidence in technology together, 2) having business owners provide reciprocal guidance in professional development, and 3) fostering mutual appreciation and commitment to community development. We conclude by introducing the concept of reciprocal capacity building to HCI and discussing how it provides a potentially more equitable approach to community-based interventions.

This study offers a critical analysis of how the Indian gig platform, Urban Company (UC), mobilizes the promise of empowerment to assemble, discipline and algorithmically entangle its gig labor force. Much of the scholarship on gig work has described how the (mis)classification of gig workers as independent contractors allows gig corporations to abdicate their employment responsibilities, thereby disentangling the traditional employer-employee relationship. By contrast, UC promises to invest in it's Indian gig workforce, with offerings such as health insurance and financial loans to counter the enduring socio-economic precarity of the Indian labor market. However, through a critical content analysis of UCs' public media, we find that UC's organization of such ''social security'' benefits rests on an insidious system of algorithmic evaluation and classification. Access to benefits is conditional, determined by the platform's algorithmic control mechanisms, which classify workers as worthy or unworthy on a shifting basis. Mobilizing Agre's analysis of business discourses of ''empowered work'', we highlight how UC's algorithmic classification of workers creates a system of ''conditional empowerment.'' This system reflects a critical shift in the labor process, from rights-based labor regimes to a neoliberal social order where individuals must constantly prove their worth.

This paper presents findings from an empirical study that uncovers the economic, psychological, and socio-cultural adaptation strategies used by recent Afghan refugees in a midwestern U.S. state. Through 14 semi-structured interviews conducted between February and April 2023, this study investigates how Afghan refugees utilize technology, tools, and skills in their resettlement process, and builds upon Hsiao et al.'s conceptualization of sociotechnical adaptation. The findings reveal (i) gender and collectivist cultural values play a big role in determining the types of adaptation strategies used by men versus women, (ii) strategic choices in terms of the type of support sought depending on shared versus non-shared identity of host community members, (iii) a notable tension between economic adaptation and preserving socio-cultural values is observed, and (iv) creative, collective solutions by women participants to address economic challenges, contributing to the discourse on solidarity economies in HCI. Key contributions include (a) design implications for technological products that can aid in psychological adaptation, fostering solidarity economies, and creating digital safe spaces for refugees to connect with shared-identity host populations, and (b) policy and program recommendations for refugee resettlement agencies to enhance digital literacy among refugees.

People share and encounter a range of posts on social media that depict different career experiences, such as one's successes or failures. In a continually shifting world of work, observing others' job experiences can be useful for navigating one's own career journey. The present study applies the possible selves theory to understand how viewing people's career experiences on social media might affect viewers' career-related expectations, hopes, and fears. From semi-structured interviews with 19 social media users with different career experiences, this study found that social media posts may facilitate functions of possible selves by 1) increasing people's awareness of new and diverse career paths and 2) motivating people in planning and preparing for a desired possible self. Across these functions, we found that videos were particularly beneficial for uncovering and learning about life in a career and that observing others' career experiences online often evoked social comparison. Through an affordances lens, findings also indicate that social media affordances of visibility and persistence were particularly relevant in developing and assessing career-related possible selves and sometimes strategically managed through leveraging platform algorithms. This paper brings forth empirical contributions to the possible selves theory in the digital age and highlights the significance of social media mechanisms for possible selves. This paper also provides design implications for social media platforms and recommendations for potential career counseling and mentoring strategies that may be useful for individuals navigating and exploring career possibilities.

The field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has traditionally focused on the design of novel technology artifacts. However, ensuring considerations for artifact maintenance and repair is crucial to sustainably supporting the populations they aim to serve over the long term. Drawing on two multi-year programs for tech capacity building in post-industrial U.S. cities, this article presents a comparative analysis to investigate the challenges and strategies for sustained community-based research in computing. In particular, our work detailed three considerations for academic-community partnerships. First, long-term partnerships prioritized transferring trust across academic and community personnel and continually set expectations that responded to evolving community initiatives (i.e., relational sustainability). Second, partnerships used academic support as a way to kickstart community initiatives, and flexibly reframed interventions to stay aligned with evolving community goals (i.e., economic sustainability). Third, partnerships trained personnel to provide technical support alongside interventions and prioritized advice that resisted short-term trends (i.e., technical sustainability). We provide concrete examples of how our two academic-community partnerships carried out such suggestions-such details go unreported in scholarly articles yet are essential for sustainability considerations. We discuss ongoing challenges, such as rethinking when longevity should and should not be the end goal.

Expanding one’s social network has been associated with greater access to resources and social support. However, little is known about how under-resourced populations decide to make new connections online and under what circumstances. We interviewed 36 low-income individuals to understand these decisions and found that people make new connections in order to seek advice and exchange support, particularly around coping with challenges more prevalent in under-resourced settings. However, participants were sometimes dissuaded from making new connections online due to fear of being scammed and hesitance around the social norms of reaching out to people outside their network. We discuss how people in under-resourced contexts grapple with ‘high risk yet high reward’ social networking and outline implications for supporting safe and purposeful network development among under-resourced SNS users.

Professional writing is critical for job search and performance, but many – especially those without work experience – struggle to write well. We introduce an instructional approach called ‘scaffolded annotation’ as a way to guide students in creating initial drafts of professional writing, like client emails and cover letters. We studied the implementation of scaffolded annotation in a digital platform called Lettersmith. First, we performed a quasi-experimental study and found that students applying scaffolded annotation in Lettersmith were more likely to include key components of professional writing. We also interviewed instructors and students who used Lettersmith and found that scaffolded annotation helped students in guiding structure, content, and tone. Instructors found the approach useful for articulating writing task expectations, pinpointing student gaps in understanding, and scaling instructional support for early-stage drafting. We provide implications for writing instruction and HCI researchers developing writing support tools.

Small businesses are being encouraged to use digital technologies more than ever before. However, the greater emphasis on technology adoption puts underserved minority business owners (those who traditionally have faced barriers in accessing credit, capital and other resources) at greater risk of being left behind. We take an assets-based approach to understand business owners' strengths and challenges in adopting and using digital technologies. We then implement a community-based intervention---Community Tech Workers (CTWs)---to bridge the growing socio-technical gap in the context of small businesses on Detroit's Eastside, which are primarily Black-women-owned businesses. We take a mixed-methods approach, using a combination of a survey, interviews, and observations, to outline how the CTW program 1) helps businesses determine where to start with technology use, 2) offers support grounded in the day-to-day realities of running a business, and 3) builds caring relationships with business owners to foster trust in technology support services. We suggest opportunities for a more collective perspective on assets-based community development and outline considerations for building culturally-conscious ecosystems of support for digital engagement.

Social media offers an alternative source for entrepreneurs to expand their social networks and obtain relevant resources to support their ambitions. Aspiring entrepreneurs with limited access to resources and social networks might rely more on the opportunities that social media tools offer. Aspiring entrepreneurs navigate social media to realize their economic dreams. Yet, those who face financial constraints often face challenges. Because aspiring entrepreneurs are transitioning to entrepreneurship, they must construct and even adapt to new work-role identities and new requisite skills, behaviors, attitudes, and patterns of interactions. In a re-analysis of a sub-sample of data from two empirical studies, this work examines how aspiring entrepreneurs living in a financially-constrained environment seek informational, social, and emotional support online and navigate their transition to entrepreneurship. These entrepreneurs obtained informational and emotional resources from observing other members' posts in online communities, including the next steps needed to adapt to their desired small business work roles. However, few publicly disclosed their informational or emotional needs online. We extend existing research on financially-constrained entrepreneurs' use of social media, contributing insights into how these resource-seeking practices limit their exploration of alternative entrepreneurial identities and feedback. We also contribute design implications to facilitate their online disclosure practices, including offering suggestions about ways to respond to questions and other disclosures in ways that restore trust and mitigate identity threats.

Racial capitalism, which describes how people in power extract value from the racial identity of others, has been a constant driver in the creative industries. As social media becomes the widespread avenue for sharing creative works and building professional reputation, the effects of racial capitalism become further amplified online. In fact, many creative professionals of color find that the biases they face offline are only replicated, and sometimes magnified, on digital platforms. In this study, we interview creative professionals of color who heavily rely on digital platforms to promote their work in order to understand how racial capitalism shapes their experience and performance of race online. Creative professionals describe seeing their work appropriated and shared for little to no recognition, while at the same time, feeling pressured to present themselves in a palatable way in order to meet the expectations of a dominant consumer audience. Creatives also worked within these capitalistic expectations by building communities with similar others in order to exchange advice, serve as role models, and share resources. Our data uncover how expectations on social media, fueled by racial biases, burden creative professionals of color, thus informing alternative futures that could compensate their work more equitably and build more inclusive spaces for creative professional growth.

In order to sustain everyday life in India during pandemic induced lockdowns, home service gig platforms materialized to provide essential services for urban society. As unemployment worsened, these gig platforms also emerged as key sources of paid work for gig workers, with some platforms promising an unusual degree of health and financial support for their gig workforce. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine how women beauty workers engaged with the infrastructural promise extended by home service gig platforms during the pandemic. While gig platforms promoted the potential of stable income and social security in the context of the Global South, we investigate the reality behind this image. We find that various breakdowns, from miscommunication around localized travel restrictions to limited platform helpline access, introduces day-to-day unpredictability for gig workers, hindering access to paid work as well as other platform extended benefits. We suggest that home service gig platforms actually serve as 'faux infrastructure,' in which the privatized logics work to enclose public value, while pushing the burden of access onto gig workers who must perform additional, often unpaid labors, in order to fill last-mile service gaps.

Rapid changes in technology are expected to limit the availability of decent work for millions of people worldwide. This particularly disadvantages socially and economically marginalized job seekers who are already being pushed into lower-wage precarious work with increasing levels of job insecurity. While the number of employment support tools that match job seekers to employers has been growing, marginalized job seekers still significantly rely on physical employment centers that have a track record of supporting the specific needs associated with marginalization and economic constraints. We drew from prior HCI and CSCW literature uncovering the employment and technology-related challenges that marginalized job seekers face and from the Psychology of Working Theory to frame our research questions and results. To complement this prior work, we investigated how employment center staff work with marginalized job seekers and moderate factors to securing decent work. We found in an interview of 21 employment center staff--career advisors and business services coordinators--that they performed significant work to prepare and encourage marginalized job seekers in applying to positions, while also training employers to be more inclusive and open-minded. Career advisors worked directly with job seekers to connect them with external resources, provide encouragement, strategize long-term goals, and mitigate feelings of stigma. Business services coordinators worked directly with employers to prepare job positions and employee support programs. Drawing from the expertise of employment centers, we contribute a framework for designing employment support tools that better serve the needs of marginalized job seekers, and outline tangible design implications that complement the support these organizations provide.

The isolating nature of platform-based work, particularly gig work involving deliveries, has created unintended consequences over how workers engage with peers, friends, family, and society in general. We performed a qualitative study involving interviews with 21 delivery workers in Bangalore, India to understand how workers experienced and responded to social isolation perpetuated by the nature and daily function of their work. We found that the stigma and individual nature of app-based delivery work restricts access to inter-relational and instrumental support. As a response, workers organized peer networks for both companionship and emergency assistance. We analyze how the cultural context of India heightens these experiences, and offer ideas for mitigating the risks of isolation as a result of gig work.

With the rise of social media, entrepreneurs are feeling the pressure to adopt digital tools for their work. However, the upfront effort and resources needed to participate on these platforms is ever more complex, particularly in underresourced contexts. Through participatory action research over two years in Detroit's Eastside, we found that local entrepreneurs preferred to become engaged digitally through a community collective, which involved (a) resource-connecting organizations, (b) regular in-person meetings, (c) paper planning tools, and (d) practice and validation. Together, these elements combined to provide (1) awareness and willingness to use digital tools, (2) regular opportunities to build internet self-efficacy, and (3) ways to collectively overcome digital obstacles. We discuss our findings in the context of digital engagement and entrepreneurship, and outline recommendations for digital platforms seeking to better support economic mobility more broadly.

Women gig workers face unique challenges in on-demand platforms as gendered aspects of class, caste, and labor participation intersect with moments of control experienced on the job. Through in-depth interviews with 19 beauty workers on on-demand home service platforms, we explore how the platformization of informal beauty work in India has ruptured dominant socio-cultural structures of control that have traditionally shaped women's mobility and access to work. This paper maps the ways in which women beauty gig workers experience and are impacted by algorithmic and bureaucratic management practices prevalent in the gig economy, in the context of home service platforms in Bangalore. We find that platform control impacts lives in myriad ways, beyond the conditions of work. Women workers negotiate their identities and sense of agency through the visibility afforded by platform control mechanisms. Yet, despite these subversions, being on a platform does not fundamentally change the socio-cultural logic that restricts women's lives in India. These mechanisms work to entrench power asymmetries between customers and workers, as well as maintain them between the platform and the worker.

Supporting learning in online communities is an important direction for the future of human–computer interaction as people increasingly leverage social technologies to support professional growth and development. However, few have studied how people leverage the socio-technical affordances of online informal workplace communities to develop professional skills in the absence of dedicated expert guidance. We draw from theories of apprenticeship to introduce an emergent theory of distributed apprenticeship, which outlines how community expectations of transparency and mutual support allow for instruction to be directed by a distributed network of nonexperts. We develop distributed apprenticeship through a qualitative study of crowdfunding entrepreneurs, where novices leverage social interactions with community members to develop a wide range of entrepreneurial skills. We then generalize distributed apprenticeship to other workplace contexts and provide design implications for online communities where people develop professional skills with minimal dedicated formal guidance.

Workers are increasingly expected to take on the responsibility and effort of preparing for employment in the new economy, where digital technologies play a central role in bridging access to resources, connections, and opportunity. Drawing from multi-year studies of entrepreneurs in Accra and Detroit, two cities that continue to experience high rates of inequality and persistently low incomes for the majority of their residents, this article highlights three key challenges to self-entrepreneurialization in the digital age: self-upgrading, maintaining technology, and overcoming exclusion. Locating these challenges at the intersection of (1) two powerful global discourses of entrepreneurialism and technology upgrade and (2) class frictions and racial dynamics, this paper uncovers ways in which CSCW might support entrepreneurialism in the new economy, particularly given that it is becoming a de facto space of work and mode of living.

Writing introductory help requests is a key part of develop-ing new professional connections, such as through email and other online messaging systems. This paper presents the design and an experimental evaluation of IntroAssist-a web-based tool that leverages cognitive apprenticeship in-structional methods to support writing introductory help requests through an expert-informed checklist, tagged peer examples, self-tagging, and suggested word limit. In a study of IntroAssist with novice entrepreneurs, we find that 1) expert raters consider help requests written with the tool as more effective, 2) participants are able to perform introduc-tory help seeking skills after the tool is removed, and 3) participants report being more likely to send help requests written with the tool. We present implications for the de-velopment of systems that support the initiation of profes-sional relationships.

Entrepreneurship has long been used to create self-employment opportunities to guard against career uncertainty. Yet, little is known about how social technologies impact the day-to-day work of entrepreneurs in resource-constrained contexts. We performed a qualitative study involving interviews with 26 micro-entrepreneurs in Detroit and observations of entrepreneurship events. We found that micro-entrepreneurs in Detroit are often pushed into entrepreneurship in response to unexpected life disruptions, barriers to employment, and desire to benefit the community. Their resource-constrained contexts shape how they use social technologies, such as sharing economy tools and social media groups, particularly with respect to privacy, safety, and professional agency. We expand the discussion in CSCW around what it means to be an entrepreneur and provide implications for how social technologies can be designed to better meet the employment needs of people in resource-constrained communities.

Makerspaces are providing new opportunities for entrepre-neurial development. Based on participant observation and a series of in-depth interviews in an entrepreneurial mak-erspace, we found that the socio-technical environment of a makerspace promotes entrepreneurship by leveraging community-based values of social support, transparency, exploration, and empowerment. The openness of a shared space, access to social technologies, and community of social support helped members develop entrepreneurial skills and self-efficacy. We add to CSCW literature on expanding the role of makerspaces as places of career development through entrepreneurship

We study how independent innovation teams develop an environment of inclusion to support gender diversity. Through a mixed-methods study involving surveys and interviews with people involved in independent innovation, we sought to better understand the mechanisms by which their teams fostered a sense of inclusion to support gender diversity via interpersonal practices and communication and collaboration technology usage. By understanding how inclusion supports gender diversity, we discuss design implications to help more diverse independent innovation teams form and function.

While universities teach students how to build new products, few students choose to further implement their work due to limited resources and mentorship. Theories of learning and innovation describe the importance of working in a social context to acquire resources from peers. While HCI researchers have built recommender and expert routing systems to identify help givers, novice designers still fail to contact expert peers for various psychological reasons, such as fear of contacting someone older or more experienced. By designing online tools and platforms that encourage and scaffold that act of help-seeking, we can connect more designers with informal mentors who can help them improve and implement their work as a professional product. The goal of my dissertation is to support help-seeking among novice designers by 1) developing an emergent model of help-seeking behavior in the context of crowdfunding, and building a tool that 2) recommends potential help-givers from one's social network and 3) presents their information in a way that encourages reaching out for advice.

Crowdfunding is emerging as a new socio-technical system that is changing how entrepreneurs interact with their community of financial supporters. While computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) researchers have begun to explore how this new type of system influences entrepreneurial work, less is understood about how the system influences their psychological experience - specifically self-efficacy, or belief in one's own ability to succeed at a task, which affects persistence, learning, and performance. Drawing on Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory, we conducted a qualitative study of 53 entrepreneurs using crowdfunding and found that crowdfunding can influence self-efficacy through (1) social validation, (2) role modeling, (3) mastery, and (4) physiological states supported by socio-technical features, such as displaying a concrete goal, examples of other's work, or public feedback. Results suggest how socio-technical systems can be designed to help entrepreneurs perform to enhance our economic and social prosperity.

Crowdfunding is changing how, why, and which research projects are pursued. With the increasing number of crowdfunded research projects, it is important to understand what drives scientists to launch crowdfunding campaigns and how it affects their work. To better understand this re-cent phenomenon, we present a grounded theory of how and why scientists crowdfund. Through 27 semi-structured interviews, we find that scientists are motivated to crowd-fund in order to share their work and engage the public in the research process in ways traditional science work has not offered. Scientists also perceive crowdfunding as a more accessible way to get funds quickly compared to existing fundraising mechanisms, such as grant applications. However, they must learn to use more accessible language to successfully communicate their research through social media to a broad audience of non-scientists and professional peers. Based on these findings, we discuss design implications to inform future crowdfunding platforms and sup-port tools.

Student entrepreneurs struggle to collect feedback on their product pitches in a classroom setting due to a lack of time, money, and access to motivated feedback providers. Online social networks present a unique opportunity for entrepreneurial students to quickly access feedback providers by leveraging their online social capital. In order to better understand how to improve crowdsourced online pitch feedback, we perform an experiment to test the effect of online anonymity on pitch feedback quality and quantity. We also test a communal feedback method—evenly distributing between teams feedback providers from the class’s collective online social networks—which would help all teams benefit from a useful amount of feedback rather than having some teams receive much more feedback than others. We found that feedback providers in the anonymous condition provided significantly more specific criticism and specific praise, which students rated as more useful. Furthermore, we found that the communal feedback method helped all teams receive sufficient feedback to edit their pitches. This research contributes an empirical investigation to the crowdsourcing community of how crowds through online social networks can help student entrepreneurs obtain authentic feedback to improve their work.

By definition, human-centered design relies on interaction with users. While interacting with users within industry can be challenging, fostering these interactions in a classroom setting can be even more difficult. This qualitative study explores the use of crowd-based design activities as a way to support student-user interactions online. We motivate these online methods through a survey of 27 design instructors, who identified common challenges of conducting student-user interactions in physical settings, including coordination constraints and geographical barriers to meeting in person. We then describe our research through design to create and test 10 activities in a classroom setting, including using Twitter for needfinding and using Reddit to brainstorm ideas with experts. Finally, we present an emergent framework outlining the design space for crowd-based design activities where students learn to use input from online crowds to inform their design work. We discuss plans to refine and expand the current set of activities for open access to instructors.

Crowdfunding provides a new way for creatives to share their work and acquire resources from their social network to influence what new ideas are realized. Yet, we understand very little about this growing phenomenon. Grounded in existing work on social network analysis, we interview 58 crowdfunding project creators to investigate how crowdfunders use their social network to reach their campaign goals. We identified three main challenges, which include understanding network capabilities, activating network connections, and expanding network reach. From our findings, we develop initial design implications for support tools to help crowdfunding project creators better understand and leverage their social network.

Crowdfunding provides a new opportunity for entrepre-neurs to launch ventures without having to rely on traditional funding mechanisms, such as banks and angel investing. Despite its rapid growth, we understand little about how crowdfunding users build ad hoc online communities to undertake this new way of performing entrepreneurial work. To better understand this phenomenon, we performed a qualitative study of 47 entrepreneurs who use crowdfunding platforms to raise funds for their projects. We identify community efforts to support crowdfunding work, such as providing mentorship to novices, giving feedback on campaign presentation, and building a repository of example projects to serve as models. We also identify where community efforts and technologies succeed and fail at support-ing the work in order to inform the design of crowdfunding support tools and systems.

Crowdfunding is changing how, why, and which ideas are brought into existence. With the increasing number of crowdfunded projects, it is important to understand what drives people to either create or fund these projects. To shed light on this new social phenomenon, we present a grounded theory of motivation informed by the first cross-platform qualitative study of the crowdfunding community. By performing 83 semistructured interviews, we uncover creator motivations, which include the desire to raise funds, expand awareness of work, connect with others, gain approval, maintain control, and learn; and supporter motivations, which include the desire to collect rewards, help others, support causes, and be part of a community. We also explore deterrents to crowdfunding participation, including, among creators, fear of failure, and, for supporters, lack of trust. Based on these findings, we provide three emergent design principles to inform the design of effective crowdfunding platforms and support tools.