Extending prior HCI and CSCW research on the invisible challenges domestic care workers face, we examine how childcare workers, particularly nannies, experience and manage workplace risks. Drawing on interviews with 21 nannies, we identified three interrelated risks—physical, emotional, and financial—arising from structural and relational constraints in employers’ homes. Through the lens of risk work, we show how these multi-dimensional constraints create tensions that hinder nannies’ direct risk mitigation strategies. This often compels them to prioritize indirect risk management to avoid tensions, leaving risks themselves unresolved. Our study highlights the need for future research and sociotechnical interventions that address domestic childcare workers’ unique constraints, identify their coping strategies through a risk work lens, and illuminate the risks obscured by indirect coping. We further call for recognizing the limitations of both personal tools and employer-centered home technologies, and propose worker-centered, reciprocal interventions as well as virtual and psychological separation in the workplace.

Scholars and practitioners in public health and social welfare increasingly recognize the need for preventative interventions that address root causes rather than respond to emergent crisis. However, they face significant challenges in designing tools and demonstrating success for these initiatives. We characterize these crucial, but difficult to develop and scale solutions, using Dan Heath’s term “upstream work”. We then explore design solutions to support upstream work through a multi-phase co-design process to assist fire departments developing alternate EMS response programs to reduce 911 call volume. We contribute to literature on designing to support data practices in community organizations and further delineate the key challenge of these programs as upstream initiatives: demonstrating success to stakeholders. We then present our co-designed prototype, a data dashboard to make the promising work of preventative programs visible for different stakeholder audiences. Finally we reflect on good practices for designing to support community based upstream initiatives.

During a global pandemic such as COVID-19, laypeople bear a large burden of responsibility for assessing risks associated with COVID-19 and taking action to manage risks in their everyday lives, yet epidemic-related information is characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity. People perceive risks based on partial, changing information. We draw on crisis informatics research to examine the multiple types of risk people perceive in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, the information sources that inform perceptions of COVID-19 risks, and the challenges that people have in getting the information they need to understand risks, using qualitative interviews with individuals across the United States. Participants describe multiple pandemic-related threats, including illness, secondary health conditions, economic, socio-behavioral, and institutional risks. We further uncover how people draw on multiple information sources from technological infrastructures, people, and spaces to inform the types of their risk perceptions, uncovering deep challenges to acquiring needed risk information.

To understand information accessibility issues, research has examined human and technical factors by taking a socio‐technical view. While this view provides a profound understanding of how people seek, use, and access information, it often overlooks the larger structure of the information landscapes that shape people's information access. However, theorizing the information landscape of a local community at the community level is challenging because of the diverse contexts and users. One way to minimize the complexity is to focus on the materiality of information. By highlighting the material aspects of information, it becomes possible to understand the community‐level structure of local information. This paper develops a theory of local information landscapes (LIL theory) to conceptualize the material structure of local information. LIL theory adapts a concept of the virtual as an ontological view of the local information that is embedded in technical infrastructures, spaces, and people. By complementing existing theories, this paper provides a new perspective on how information deserts manifest as a material pre‐condition of information inequality. Based on these theoretical models, a research agenda is presented for future studies of local communities.

Computational Archival Science (CAS) has been proposed as a trans-disciplinary field that combines computational and archival thinking. To provide grounded evidence, a foundational paper explored eight initial themes that constitute potential building blocks [1]. In order for a CAS community to emerge, further studies are needed to test this framework. While the foundational paper for CAS provides a conceptual and theoretical basis of this new field, there is still a need to articulate useful guidelines and checkpoints that validate a CAS research agenda. In this position paper, we propose heuristics for assessing emerging CAS-related studies that researchers from traditional fields can use in their research design stage. The Human Face of Big Data project, a digital curation and interface design project for urban renewal data, is presented and analyzed to demonstrate the validity of the suggested heuristics. Finally, implications for CAS and future work are discussed.