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.

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.

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.

In this paper, we present the results of a study that examines the role of data in nonprofit advocacy work. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 individuals who play critical roles in the data work of 18 different advocacy organizations. Our analysis reveals five key stakeholders in advocacy data work-beneficiaries, policymakers, funding and partner organizations, gatekeepers, and local publics. It also contributes a framework of four functions of data work in nonprofit organizations-data as amplifier, activator, legitimizer, and incubator. We characterize the challenges in data work that exist, particularly in widespread attempts to reappropriate data work across functions. These challenges in reappropriation are often rooted in participants' effects to enact data feminist principles from the margins of the data economy. Finally, we discuss how nonprofit institutions operate outside of the dominant data work goals known as the three Ss (surveillance, selling, and science) and propose a fourth S, social good, that is working to challenge the norms of the data economy and should be considered in research regarding the data economy moving forward.

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.