Recent work in Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) argues that improving our relationship with nature demands designing for nature as plural and multiple. This means moving beyond approaches that impose one version of what nature is, toward sustaining its different enactments and relationships. This paper examines how such ontological multiplicity can be sustained through design. Drawing on Mol’s ontological multiplicity and Stengers’ scene-setting, we present the Toronto Water Atlas, a seven-month design project involving artists, scientists, and community members. Through workshops and coworking sessions, we experimented with various design choices that surfaced and sustained multiple enactments of water, in direct contrast with singular formulations of water prevalent in informatics used for policy and planning. Through this work, we draw attention to the infrastructural biases that restrict ontological multiplicity, and demonstrate how design can more deliberately sustain diverse water ontologies by staging conditions for partial, and relational enactments.

When conducting research in community-based settings, it is natural for conflict to arise as the practices, motivations, and imaginaries of researchers and local stakeholders converge. As designers, the question, then, is: “In what ways can we engage with conflict to arrive at constructive outcomes?" In this paper, we employ ethnography and a mapping workshop with an environmental research group facing conflicts at a contested ecological site. We unpack some of the ways in which local conflicts over data, mapping, and technologies around community-managed forests are intertwined with broader socio-political, historical, and value-based contestations. We find that conflict serves as a critical site for negotiating community engagement and configuring collaboration. Accordingly, we provide strategies for surfacing, navigating, and staying with conflict in contested settings. For community-based researchers, this requires resisting the natural tendency to seek an immediate resolution to the conflict, thereby creating room to deepen attachments to matters of concern.

People with visual impairments (PwVI) increasingly rely on digital navigation tools to travel independently, yet these tools misalign with the lived realities of navigating unpredictable urban environments, especially during severe weather events. Drawing on a journey mapping workshop, we explore how PwVI combine mobile apps, Orientation and Mobility (O&M) training, and human assistance to build flexible routines that adapt to recurrent disruptions, and prioritize predictability, safety, and confidence over speed. We argue that digital navigation technologies should support resilience through considering interoperability and designing for routine breakdown and multiple temporalities. We further articulate critical design considerations to better align accessible navigation with the everyday practices of PwVI.

HCI’s dominant assumptions of always-on and relatively ubiquitous internet connectivity often overlook other potential configurations of connectivity, which may embody alternative social values and politics, or promote alternative types of technology practices. Building on research exploring alternate configurations of connectivity, we develop and present three speculative scenarios in a North American context that configure internet connectivity differently than these dominant assumptions. Each scenario features a "foot pedal" that mediates internet connectivity. Through the scenarios, we conceptualize connectivity as a multi-dimensional ecology. The scenarios explore how alternative configurations of connectivity implicate concerns related to dimensions of: social norms and rituals; maintenance, repair, and governance; interests and decision-making beyond individual choice; and broader inequalities and systems of power. These suggest possible alternative ends and goals of internet connectivity. Finally, we offer reflections from our experience developing these scenarios for HCI scholars working with speculative practices.

Peer Reviewed

Contemporary urban climate adaptation and mitigation strategies both draw upon and produce diverse forms of data. As the tenets of data-driven governance are increasingly integrated into city governments' climate policy, careful attention to this intersection is necessary to evaluate how to best leverage data as part of municipal climate action. This project applies a practice-based approach to research, employing a combination of document analysis and semi-structured interviews to identify a set of climate data practices that offer a rich understanding of the role of data in climate politics in the City of Toronto. Together, the practices described in this paper illuminate a set of double-binds created through the pursuit of data-driven climate governance. To help navigate these contradictions we draw on research in HCI, STS, environmental justice, anthropology and urban planning to propose alternative approaches to guide future design and research.

This paper contrasts the consolidation of the American mega-logistics industry with homegrown logistics operations based in neighborhoods of New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic. We offer three cases: a community of immigrant street vendors in Corona, Queens; a theater-turned-food-pantry in the Lower East Side of Manhattan; and the city-wide network of mutual aid organizations. We note the ways these alternative forms of logistics stitch together technologies, delivery processes, and social networks-often quite creatively-to get food and other resources where they need to be, when they needs to be there. These logistics networks are locally-oriented, fit to specific requirements, and made up of tailored, ad hoc activities. They demonstrate flexibility and skillful work in a crisis and bring together volunteers, entrepreneurs, and necessary resources with a community-at-need in horizontal governance. In doing so, they model forms of supply chains that improve social welfare and offer alternatives to the growing consolidation of mega logistics. We identify opportunites for CSCW scholars to use insights from the field including theories of infrastructure and technology and social movements to support the further development of such supply chains.

This article introduces climate data practices as a conceptual lens for HCI research and design toward social and environmental justice. We offer a working definition of this approach, which we locate at the intersection of critical data studies and practice theory. Drawing from a collaborative and multi-sited study of activists, city staff, and non-profit organizations, we present six examples of climate data practices as a means of illustrating the approach as well as the diversity of issues that it may usefully surface. Through these examples, we demonstrate that a data practices approach foregrounds the local, relational, and plural qualities of climate data. Finally, we connect data practices to two related concepts—scenes and infrastructures—which together offer a framework to guide critical interrogation of the social and political life of data, and support the design of data practices that serve broader goals of social and environmental justice.

Though not often considered primary users or creators of climate change data, grassroots climate activism is increasingly data driven. This study looks at the ways in which grassroots climate justice groups engage with data to further their goals. The authors employ a qualitative research design rooted in reflexive thematic analysis for this project, with methods including a series of semi-structured interviews and an analysis of digital content produced by grassroots climate justice groups. We identify five distinct functions of data which support the work of local climate activists. These functions highlight how engagement with data in this context is intertwined with autonomy, affect and the reframing of what counts as climate data and expertise. This study contributes to further understanding of the relationship between grassroots climate justice groups and data practices, highlights barriers groups face with data engagement, and offers recommendations for HCI to further support local climate action.

In the design of contemporary mapping technologies, effective navigation has become synonymous with the quickest route, limiting the extent to which people engage with the places they move in and around. This paper unsettles the prevalent focus on efficiency and explores opportunities to support placemaking during everyday practices of navigation. Drawing on 16 interviews and using the Value Sensitive Design framework, we identify seven alternative values, beyond efficiency, that hold significance for people navigating the city. Through a series of two design workshops, we further examine how and when these values come to matter during navigation. Our findings suggest four ways in which the prevalent design standards of navigational apps work against these values, and highlight their potential contribution to placemaking during technology mediated navigation. In doing so, this paper contributes to placemaking research and ongoing questions of efficiency and optimization within HCI.

Commons emerge and are reclaimed through collective, shared, and self-organized practices known as commoning. Despite their historical embeddedness in South Asian communities, commoning practices have succumbed to enclosure and destruction due to region-wide privatization and development schemes implemented over the past century. Certain HCI and ICTD research has critiqued such schemes for undermining community autonomy and well-being. To advance the development of alternative models, we conducted a literature review of HCI research involving the commons, considering both natural and digital resources, in South Asia. Additionally, we examine the social practices, rules, and institutional arrangements described in the corpus through the lens of Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for commons governance. Based on our findings, we formulate a commoning framework by synthesizing three areas of HCI research — infrastructuring, participatory design, and assets-based design — proposing it as an alternative to neoliberal development paradigms for future HCI research.

Communicating risk to the public in the lead-up to and during severe weather events has the potential to reduce the impacts of these events on lives and property. Globally, these events are anticipated to increase due to climate change, rendering effective risk communication an integral component of climate adaptation policies. Research in risk communications literature has developed substantial knowledge and best practices for the design of risk messaging. This study considers the potential for quantifying the compliance of severe weather risk messages with these best practices, individually and at scale, and developing tools to improve risk communication messaging. The current work makes two contributions. First, we develop a string-matching approach to evaluate whether messaging complies with best practices and suggest areas for improvement. Second, we conduct an interview study with risk communication professionals to inform the design space of authoring tools and other technologies to support severe weather risk communicators.

Lack of interfaith communication often gives rise to prejudice and group-based conflict in multi-faith societies. Nurturing this communication via interfaith learning may reduce this conflict by fostering interfaith empathy. HCI has a dearth of knowledge on interfaith coexistence and empathy building. To address this gap, we present the design, implementation, and usability of Cohabitant: a virtual reality (VR) application that promotes interfaith learning and empathy. Cohabitant’s design is theoretically underpinned by Allport’s intergroup contact theory and informed by insights from a participatory workshop we ran with members of three religious groups: Christians, Hindus, and Muslims. Our evaluation study, combining quantitative and qualitative data from 30 participants, suggests that Cohabitant may enhance general interpersonal empathy, but falls short for ethnocultural empathy. We discuss the possible design and policy implications of using this kind of VR technology for interfaith learning and empathy building.

The objective of this study was to investigate and classify the roles, or distinct contribution styles, adopted by participants within the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community. Using a quantitative analysis of mapping behaviors, we devised a methodology to identify distinct features associated with specific roles. We used an unsupervised clustering approach and unveiled eight discernible roles, or types of mapper in OSM. Each role displays specific patterns of mapping behaviors related to their habits and preferences for adding or editing map objects over time. We validated our roles, in part, using known affiliations with humanitarian and corporate organizations. Using these roles, we examine community composition and contributor retention over time. Our contributions include applying existing methods on the analysis of contributor behavior in online platforms to OSM, the identification of eight roles that can guide future research and design within OSM, and further understanding into the overall trajectory of the world’s largest geospatial peer production community.

In response to climate change and continued urbanization, urban transportation systems around the world are undergoing transitions to promote lower-emission vehicles, public transit, biking and walking. However, mobility is a complex issue that raises important questions of social justice as a result of its connections to numerous aspects of everyday life and the broader social and political contexts. Drawing on interviews with transportation advocates across Canada, we identify four ways in which the design and use of existing mobility tools and technologies perpetuate mobility injustices, and deepen the divide between urban planners and the public. Looking across these arguments, we note path-dependence in transportation knowledge infrastructures as a common barrier to mobility justice advocacy that can be difficult to recognize or overcome. Finally, we consider tactics that research in HCI and CSCW might pursue as part of efforts to unsettle path-dependence and reorient transportation planning towards mobility justice.

The social life and long-term trajectories of online peer production communities are shaped and animated in part by value tensions that arise when distributed, heterogeneous participants are brought together into collaboration. This study of OpenStreetMap (OSM) draws upon values-based approaches to investigate how peer production communities enact their values and navigate tensions between them. We examine how conflicts within the community over the rise of corporate participation in OSM provided a stage for the articulation and enactment of community values, shedding light on the broader dynamics and trajectory of the platform and its participants. The contributions of this work include reflections on how increasing corporate participation in OSM intersects with discourses about the emancipatory potential of emerging mapping technologies, insights into the challenges of scaling membership in peer production communities, and exploring the role of values in understanding the social life and governance of online communities.

Digital upskilling and remote work are frequently presented as pathways for displaced communities who face political, economic crises and employment barriers. The viability and stability of available energy infrastructures for these communities is critical to the long-term success of these proposed job trajectories. In this paper, we investigate how 17 Syrian refugees living in Lebanon navigate their local unstable energy infrastructures to conduct digital gig work and receive digital training. We found that digital gig work and training are workarounds to the political and social inaccessibility of local labor markets for refugees and that participants rely on a series of material energy strategies to optimize their electricity access. We argue that to support refugees conducting digital gig work and training, we must recognize and account for ecological, social, and technological limitations and frailties in the development of technological solutions and draw our attention to how infrastructures are perpetually undergoing processes of breakdown, repair, and renewal. We argue that this attention to ongoing transformation and renewal creates new opportunities for productive and creative reconfiguration as well as modes through which CSCW may intervene in unstable energy contexts. From this perspective, we emphasize the importance of better resourcing displaced communities with information regarding energy access and supporting them in establishing and strengthening their own visions for alternative energy systems and employment pathways.

Informal and emergent organizations play a vital role in disaster response, and are a central concern to crisis informatics. Prior research in the field has tended to focus on the activities of individual organizations during periods of disaster. Though unsurprising, this focus has led to limited understanding of the origins and long-term trajectories of these organizations or their participation in broader networks of informal response, whose individual membership, ideologies, and practices are often fluid and overlapping. In this paper, we examine the activities of informal organizations that mobilized in response to the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 17 participants, we identify five categories of resources - funding, people, information, skills, and shared values - that these organizations mobilized to sustain themselves and continue their activities long after the immediate disaster abated. We contribute insights into the adaptation decisions of emergent organizations, guidance in understanding these decisions in relation to their social and historical context, and considerations for how long-term, network-oriented studies can help address some of the contemporary challenges in crisis-informatics research.

Despite significant research on online harm, polarization, public deliberation, and justice, CSCW still lacks a comprehensive understanding of the experiences of religious minorities, particularly in relation to fear, as prominently evident in our study. Gaining faith-sensitive insights into the expression, participation, and inter-religious interactions on social media can contribute to CSCW's literature on online safety and interfaith communication. In pursuit of this goal, we conducted a six-month-long, interview-based study with the Hindu, Buddhist, and Indigenous communities in Bangladesh. Our study draws on an extensive body of research encompassing the spiral of silence, the cultural politics of fear, and communication accommodation to examine how social media use by religious minorities is influenced by fear, which is associated with social conformity, misinformation, stigma, stereotypes, and South Asian postcolonial memory. Moreover, we engage with scholarly perspectives from religious studies, justice, and South Asian violence and offer important critical insights and design lessons for the CSCW literature on public deliberation, justice, and interfaith communication.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the relationship between art and HCI. New HCI research draws on artistic practices as a source of design inspiration, turns to the arts for assistance in solving wicked problems, or uses design research to understand artistic collaboration. Despite the widely noted potential of art-HCI research, the relationship between the two fields remains poorly understood, and precise descriptions of what makes art-HCI collaboration successful remain elusive. In this paper, we look at artist-in-residence (AiR) programs within STEM organizations as a way of learning about these collaborations. Drawing on interviews with individuals with recent involvement in these programs, we identify a series of design considerations for these residencies and note recurring concerns. Finally, we argue that many challenges in these programs arise from the instrumentalization of art, and recommend ways to foster more meaningful relations through AiR programs.

Agriculture is foundational for food security on our planet. Considering climate change and other pressures on food production, HCI scholars have increasingly begun to examine how the field should approach agricultural innovation. We conducted a literature review of HCI research through the lens of competing future visions for good food systems : a “conventional” vision of profit-oriented production, and an “alternative” which prioritizes sustainability and community-led practices. Leveraging the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, we provide an empirical analysis of how HCI and adjacent applied computing projects align with these competing visions for agriculture. This review reveals, amongst other findings, a prioritization of the perspectives of the Global North and a need for more careful attention to the constraints and aspirations of subsistence farmers. Finally, we note the limits of the conventional-alternative binary that shapes much of contemporary HCI research focused on agriculture and offer opportunities for transcending this framing.

Emancipation is fundamentally a work of unmaking, as it entails undermining, dissolving, and undoing oppressive structures. This paper offers an account of a frequently misunderstood unmaking movement, Luddism. The Luddites were a loosely organized collective of nineteenth century English textile makers who destroyed machines that were replacing their skilled labor and leading to deteriorating working conditions. In this account, we show that the goals and tactics of Luddism have significant alignments with current HCI work in the areas of unmaking and social justice. Through articulation of six characteristics of unmaking in Luddism - practical and symbolic, community-engaged, emancipatory, selective, antagonistic, and enduring - we identify potential limits and opportunities in HCI research and design practice, as currently construed. In doing so, we build upon and extend prior HCI research to suggest unmaking as emancipation, a new category of unmaking around issues of social justice.

Prison and police abolition has become a major political philosophy in North American discourse following the 2020 George Floyd protests. The philosophy remains divisive, and North American abolitionists seeking to coalition-build, provide resources for vulnerable populations and garner public support continue to experience challenges. We explore current usage of digital tools among abolitionists and the potential of a digital mapping tool to address these challenges. We conduct an interview study with 15 abolitionist organizations to understand activists' perspectives on the value of digital tools for organizing and a content analysis of 25 existing digital tools that convey abolitionist ideas to the public. Our findings together reveal (1) opportunities for digital mapping and HCI to support abolitionist activism and grassroots activism more broadly and (2) the challenges of digitally and spatially representing a movement that is intentionally grassroots, clandestine, and often involves organizers working in disparate locations.

Open Data has become a prominent ideal in humanitarian information work and is increasingly promoted for crisis situations to increase effectiveness, accountability, and empower citizens. However, like all socio-technical systems, open data platforms for disasters make implicit and explicit assumptions about data, data users, disasters, and the context of use. In this paper, we turn to feminist theory to examine three open data projects rolled out in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. We used the seven principles of Data Feminism introduced by D'Ignazio and Klein to design an evaluative framework for the three projects. We use this framework to highlight and link the socio-political nature of both disasters and open data platforms. In our results, we highlight significant gaps in how these projects made labor (in)visible, engaged with affective aspects of disaster, addressed context, and challenged power. We argue that these gaps are reflective of dominant practices in open data for disasters and serve as opportunities for designers and crisis informatics researchers to reimagine the potential of such projects. We propose four ways of doing so based on feminist principles and values.

This special issue builds on and expands HCI’s engagement with historical approaches, questioning our field’s ontological orientations and offering new methods for examining the past. The set of articles featured reinvigorates questions on whose technological labor matters, how we might challenge the racist and misogynistic consequences of HCI’s inter-disciplinary inheritances, and offer new modes of liberatory world-making. Taken together, this collection serves as an act of reclamation of the lineage of our field, providing resources and guidance for a more just present and future.

Communicating risk to the public in the lead-up to tropical storms has the potential to significantly reduce the impacts on both livelihood and property. While significant research has been conducted in the storm risk community on how people receive, seek, and utilize risk information, given the importance of computing technologies and social media in these activities, human-centered design stands to make important contributions to this area. Drawing on an extensive literature review and 48 interviews with hurricane experts and members of the public, this paper makes three contributions. First, we provide a broad overview of hurricane risk communication. We then offer a set of guiding insights to inform HCI research work in this domain. Finally, we identify 6 opportunities that future human centered design work might pursue. In sum, this paper offers an invitation and a starting point for HCI to take up the problem of hurricane risk communication.

During disasters, emergency shelters play a central role in emergency management, providing both a secure environment and centralized sites for the distribution of information, material relief supplies, and access to health and human services. Despite their importance, challenges such as physical access, public awareness, and peoples’ willingness to relocate limit the impact of both shelters managed by emergency responders and informal locations created by affected communities. This paper presents research conducted as part of a long-term project aimed at designing digital tools to assist communities and formal responders plan and manage emergency shelters. Working with partners in Puerto Rico, we developed and distributed cultural probes in three communities with recent experience of hurricanes and earthquakes to better understand the needs and resources of disaster affected people related to shelter. This approach yielded novel insights that challenge and expand traditional views of emergency shelters and identified several areas where HCI research and design can contribute to the sector.

Emerging techniques developed by AI researchers promise to offer the capacity to support disaster risk management (DRM), through making data collection or analysis practices faster, less costly, or more accurate. However, in every socially consequential domain in which AI tools have been applied, these technologies have been demonstrated to have some degree of negative consequences. This paper explores an attempt to convene technical experts in the area of DRM to discuss potential negative impacts, their approaches toward mitigating these impacts as well as identifying some of the overarching challenges. In doing so, we contribute new findings about a domain that has received relatively little attention from critical and ethical AI researchers, and the opportunities and limitations that are presented by working with domain experts to evaluate the social consequences of emerging technologies.

Fears of climate change and the escalating impacts of environmental damage are growing, and recent papers in the area of Sustainable HCI have called for urgent, non-linear solutions to these problems. Speculative design, along with related approaches including design fiction, have been taken up as means of navigating the "wicked problems" that structure contemporary nature/society relations. We conduct a survey of speculative design papers published in ACM venues between 2008 and 2021, assessing fundamental questions such as who is involved in the process, how is sustainability framed, and how is speculation used. Our evaluation of this body of work yielded mixed results; we find both promising trends as well as notable and problematic limitations in how the HCI community is taking up speculative practice in this domain. We build upon this evaluation to offer four provocations to designers seeking to use speculative practice in support of sustainability goals.

This design fiction re-imagines an important informational element of the flood early warning system in order to unpack some of the questionable assumptions that society makes about disaster. In presenting an updated, ironic, vision of an alternative system, we highlight some of the ways that received ideas about the root causes of disaster, who is responsible for public safety, and the role of private sector innovation, are so embedded in the design of technologies used in crisis management that they have become taken for granted. This work demonstrates the potential for design fiction to serve as a tool in the evaluation and critique of safety-critical information systems and as a communication tool for conveying the complex findings of disaster research. It also points to new avenues of exploration for crisis informatics work on public warning systems.

ICTs such as mapping platforms, algorithms, and databases are a central component of how society responds to the threats posed by disasters. However, these systems have come under increasing criticism in recent years for prioritizing technical disciplines over insights from the humanities and social science and failing to adequately incorporate the perspectives of at-risk or affected communities. This paper describes a unique month-long workshop that convened interdisciplinary experts to collaborate on projects related to flood data. In addition to findings about the practical accomplishment of interdisciplinary collaboration, we offer three interrelated contributions. First, we position interdisciplinarity as a critical practice and offer a detailed example of how we staged this process. We then discuss the benefits to interdisciplinarity of expanding the range of temporal logics normally deployed in design workshops. Finally, we reflect on approaches to evaluating the event's contributions toward sustained critique and reform of expert practice.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, networks of community organizers and activists mobilized to support their neighbors as part of mutual aid groups across the United States. Emergent community response is a common phenomenon during crisis, but mutual aid in the pandemic took on a distinct character, drawing on traditions of political and community organizing. Our research into these activities suggests that mutual aid organizing in relation to disaster is growing practice but remains evolving and contested. Drawing on interviews with organizers of mutual aid groups in New York, we identify a series of four dilemmas that mutual aid organizers encountered in their work, with impacts on their organizational strategy and technology choices. We then raise three implications for crisis informatics to support community response to disaster: taking a long view of crises, centering questions of equity, and adopting a transformative vision of emergency response.

This paper contributes to the development of an under-utilized area of focus for CSCW research and design: history. The design and evaluation of technology, as practiced in the field, has positioned CSCW as a largely forward-looking community. The enduring "presentism' and lack of historical view threatens to leave out a wealth of resources that can inspire design, support comparative analysis, and develop a deeper understanding of technology development and its social consequences. This paper argues that a historicist sensibility should inform the due diligence of all CSCW research, and we present connection points for the various ways in which historical research might more deeply inform CSCW, while offering a selection of historiographic challenges to sensitize CSCW scholars as we seek to better situate our collective work within both the present moment as well as ongoing temporal change.

Information systems increasingly shape our knowledge of crises such as disasters and climate change. While these tools improve our capacity to understand, prepare for, and mitigate such challenges, critical questions are being raised about how their design shapes public imagination of these problems and delimits potential solutions. Prior work in human-computer interaction (HCI) has pointed to art/science collaboration as one approach for helping to explore such questions. As an attempt to draw on this potential, our team designed and facilitated a 2-day "artathon" that brought together artists and scientists to create new works of art based on disaster and climate data. Reflecting on the artathon and its outcomes, we contribute two sets of findings. First, we articulate opportunities, suggested by the artwork, for expanding research and design in crisis informatics. Second, we offer suggestions for HCI researchers seeking to stage successful art/science collaborations or similar inter-disciplinary events.

Information infrastructures have become integral components of policy debates related to climate change and sustainability. To better understand this relationship, we studied the tools used to forecast and respond to sea-level rise in the San Francisco Bay Area, where active debates on how to best prepare for this issues are underway and will have important consequences for the future of the region. Drawing on 18 months of qualitative research we argue that competing visions of the problem are intimately intertwined with different elements of information infrastructure and beliefs about the role of data in policymaking. Current infrastructure in the region, far from being a neutral actor in these debates, exhibits an infrastructural bias, privileging some approaches over others. We identify some of the tactics that community organizations deploy to subvert the claims of sea-level rise experts and advance their own perspective, which prioritizes considerations of justice over technical expertise.

The importance of social media usage during crisis has been well established in academic and practitioner communities. Yet, the promise of rendering insights from social media for responders in a consistent and reliable manner remains a challenge and accepted standards of practice have yet to emerge. Inspired by a May 2017 workshop consisting of 15 Crisis Informatics practitioners from 3 continents, we imagine a training curriculum aimed at developing the necessary skills to harness social media data during a crisis. We call the recipients of that training Crisis Informatics Research Technicians (CIRT). We offer this design fiction to stimulate a conversation among Crisis Informatics scholars, Human-Computer Interaction scholars, crisis response professionals, and the public on best practices, tools, limitations, and ethics of using social media to improve crisis response.

Today, disaster events are mobilizing digital volunteers to meet the data needs of those on the ground. One form of this crowd work is Volunteered Geographic Information. This peer-produced spatial data creates the most up-to-date map of the affected region; maintaining the accuracy of these data is therefore a critical task. Accuracy is one aspect of data quality, a relative concept requiring standards to measure against. The field of Geographic Information Sciences has developed standards for this comparison, achieving widespread acceptance. However, the peer production model of spatial data presents new opportunities—and challenges—to traditional methods of quality assessment. Through analysis of the OpenStreetMap database, we show that temporal editing patterns and contributor characteristics can provide additional means of understanding spatial data quality. Drawing upon experiences from Wikipedia, we offer and evaluate three intrinsic quality metrics of peer-produced spatial data to assess the quality of contributions to OpenStreetMap for crisis response.

In the aftermath of major natural disasters, governments, aid agencies, and affected populations engage in practices of sense-making to gauge the extent and severity of the crisis, direct response activities, and coordinate recovery planning. To understand the conduct and implications of these practices, we examined the official damage assessment implemented by the Government of Nepal following the April 2015 earthquake. In addition, we undertook participatory mapping to examine the consequences of this assessment in the Langtang Valley, a severely-affected area of the country. We argue that the informatics of post-disaster damage assessment in Nepal played a primary role in narrating the events of the 2015 earthquake, legitimating particular paths toward recovery in the aftermath, and limiting opportunities for alternative configurations of social life that emerge during disasters. Our research demonstrates the ways that forms of sense-making afforded by information technologies play central roles in enacting repair-work following crisis and breakdown.

Over the past 20 years, the practices of crisis preparedness, response, and recovery have become increasingly dependent on information and communication technology (ICT) to accomplish their work. More recently, crisis informatics has developed an analysis of these phenomena from social and computational perspectives. To further to assess the consequences and opportunities of technological developments in the field, we re-interpret the concept of informating, first developed by Zuboff to describe the impacts of technological changes on the workplace during the 1980s. We draw on four contemporary examples of how ICT is changing the way we conceive of and respond to natural hazards to offer a new reading of the concept of informating in the growing field of crisis informatics. We then argue that this concept suggests the adoption of a more critical agenda for crisis informatics research to better respond to contemporary challenges presented by climate change and natural hazards.

This paper reports on two years of ethnographic observation of the science and politics of flood risk in Colorado, as well as design research that examines citizen interaction with expert knowledge about flooding in the region. We argue that the 100-year floodplain standard that inform maps produced by the USA Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s National Floodplain Insurance Program (NFIP) represent a problematic form of discursive closure of scientific understanding of flood hazard. We show that in order to meet the requirements of the NFIP, this standard acts as a closure that conveys a certainty that the underlying science does not warrant and foreshortens dialogue on disaster risk and public understanding of flood hazard. Engaging with literature in science and technology studies and human-centered computing, we investigate design opportunities for resisting closure and supporting public formation through encounters with the uncertainty and complexities of risk information.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the most widely used volunteer geographic information system. Although it is increasingly relied upon during humanitarian response as the most up-to-date, accurate, or accessible map of affected areas, the behavior of the mappers who contribute to it is not well understood. In this paper, we explore the work practices and interactions of volunteer mappers operating in the high-tempo, high-volume context of disasters. To do this, we built upon and expanded prior network analysis techniques to select high-value portions of the vast OSM data for further qualitative analysis. We then performed detailed content analysis of the identified activity and, where possible, conducted interviews with the participants. This research allowed the identification of seven distinct mapping practices that can be classified according to dimensions of time, space, and interpersonal interaction. Our work represents a baseline for future research about how OSM crisis mapping practices have evolved over time.

Disasters and their impacts have unavoidable spatial characteristics. As such, maps are necessary and omnipresent features of the information landscapes that surround and support disaster response. Professional and volunteer GIS services are increasingly in demand to support map-based information visualization during crises. This paper investigates the work of mapmakers working on the response to the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. In comparison to prior events, we found significantly more collaboration and spatial data sharing took place between map producers working across humanitarian organizations and parts of the Nepal government. Collaboration between mapping practitioners was supported by a complex and emergent information infrastructure composed of social and technical elements, some of which were brought through experience with prior disaster events, and some which were shaped anew by the availability and acceptance of open data sources. Our research investigates these elements of the spatial information infrastructure in post-earthquake Nepal to consider infrastructural emergence.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a volunteer-driven, globally distributed organization whose members work to create a common digital map of the world. OSM embraces ideals of open data, and to that end innovates both socially and technically to develop practices and processes for coordinated operation. This paper provides a brief history of OSM and then, through quantitative and qualitative examination of the OSM database and other sites of articulation work, examines organizational growth through the lens of two catastrophes that spurred enormous humanitarian relief responses-the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and the 2013 Typhoon Yolanda. The temporally- and geographically- constrained events scope analysis for what is a rapidly maturing, whole-planet operation. The first disaster identified how OSM could support other organizations responding to the event. However, to achieve this, OSM has had to refine mechanisms of collaboration around map creation, which were tested again in Typhoon Yolanda. The transformation of work between these two events yields insights into the organizational development of large, data-producing online organizations.