When social networking sites give users granular control over their privacy settings, the result is that some content across the site is public and some is not. How might this content--or characteristics of users who post publicly versus to a limited audience--be different? If these differences exist, research studies of public content could potentially be introducing systematic bias. Via Mechanical Turk, we asked 1,815 Facebook users to share recent posts. Using qualitative coding and quantitative measures, we characterize and categorize the nature of the content. Using machine learning techniques, we analyze patterns of choices for privacy settings. Contrary to expectations, we find that content type is not a significant predictor of privacy setting; however, some demographics such as gender and age are predictive. Additionally, with consent of participants, we provide a dataset of nearly 9,000 public and non-public Facebook posts.

Online communities dedicated to the creation of fanworks (e.g., fiction or art inspired by media such as books or television shows) often serve as communities of practice for learning communication, artistic, and technical skills. In studying one successful fan fiction archive that was designed and built entirely by (predominantly women) fans, we observed processes of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) in which some of these fans began in peripheral roles and came to be more involved in the technical aspects of the archive over time. In addition to outlining positive outcomes, we discuss the challenges of supporting learning within this CoP, particularly with respect to the burden on experts. We discuss potential implications and solutions for the problem of expert scarcity in CoPs, and propose that LPP within fan communities can be leveraged for broadening participation in computing among women.

Rarely are computing systems developed entirely by members of the communities they serve, particularly when that community is underrepresented in computing. Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fan fiction archive with nearly 750,000 users and over 2 million individual works, was designed and coded primarily by women to meet the needs of the online fandom community. Their design decisions were informed by existing values and norms around issues such as accessibility, inclusivity, and identity. We conducted interviews with 28 users and developers, and with this data we detail the history and design of AO3 using the framework of feminist HCI and focusing on the successful incorporation of values into design. We conclude with considering examples of complexity in values in design work: the use of design to mitigate tensions in values and to influence value formation or change.