As data becomes integral to civic processes and resource distribution, there is a need for methods in which communities generate, interpret, and act on data to address their priorities. We introduce ROOTED (Reclaiming and Organizing Our Truths for Equity through Data), a community-centered framework grounded in Black Feminist Thought. By cultivating community data practices, ROOTED helps residents leverage their local insights, lived experiences, and data to pursue equitable outcomes by using data as a tool for advocacy, organizing, and local transformation. Through two case studies, we demonstrate how researchers and communities can collaboratively implement ROOTED. Our findings suggest that residents use data to build power and relationships to collectively achieve their goals. This paper contributes a framework and case study examples that demonstrate how to design community data systems and practices that produce actionable outcomes aligned with residents’ visions for their futures.

There has been growing attention in HCI to the potential for community-based participatory research (CBPR) to cause harm to community partners. Extractive research is when researchers take ''data'' (i.e., stories, knowledge) and other resources (e.g., time, labor) from communities but provide little in return. Scholars have examined collaboration practices, but this work has yet to focus on data analysis. We (academic and community researchers) explore the benefits, challenges, and power dynamics involved in collaborative analysis. We reflected on our process to co-analyze workshop data from a community-led initiative through member-checking interviews and a duo ethnography. In this paper, we detail the co-analysis approach we used and examine how structural power can incentivize extractive research practices. We pose that co-analyzing data according to community-defined questions can mitigate harm and advance community partners' goals.

With increased public scrutiny of policing and growing calls for community-based violence prevention, street outreach programs that hire residents to mediate conflicts in their neighborhoods are gaining support. To understand how street outreach workers (SOWs) use information and communication technologies (ICTs) and how they envision future ICTs that better support their work, we interviewed 25 SOWs across three organizations. Results suggest that SOWs leverage ICTs to: 1) identify and mediate conflict; 2) support collaboration and teamwork; and 3) invoke community connections and trust. SOWs posit that new ICTs could provide a seamless infrastructure for communication among SOWs and between community members, assist with training to sharpen conflict negotiation skills, and provide insight on effective conflict mediation strategies.

Global protests and civil unrest in 2020 has renewed the world’s interest in addressing injustice due to structural racism and oppression toward Black and Latinx people in all aspects of society, including computing. In this article, we argue that to address and repair the harm created by institutions, policies, and practices that have systematically excluded Black and Latina girls from computer science, an intersectional, transformative justice approach must be taken. Leveraging testimonial authority, we share our past 8 years of experience designing, implementing, and studying Digital Youth Divas, a programmatic and systemic approach to encouraging middle school Black and Latina girls to participate in STEM. Specifically, we propose three principles to counter structural racism and oppression embedded in society and computing education: computing education must (1) address local histories of injustice by engaging community members; (2) counter negative stereotypes perpetuated in computer science by creating inclusive safe spaces and counter-narratives; and (3) build sustainable, computational capacity in communities. To illustrate each principle, we provide specific examples of the harm created by racist policies and systems and their effect on a specific community. We then describe our attempt to create counter structures and the subsequent outcomes for the girls, their families, and the community. This work contributes a framework for STEM and computing educators to integrate transformative justice as a method of repairing the harm that both society and the field of computing has and continues to cause Black and Latinx communities. We charge policy makers, educators, researchers, and community leaders to examine histories of oppression in their communities and to adopt holistic, transformative approaches that counter structural oppression at the individual and system level.

Street outreach is a violence prevention model in which organizations hire residents with strong relationships and local expertise to mediate violent conflicts in their communities. We present the results of a two-year co-design engagement between a street outreach organization and academic researchers in which we collaboratively designed, built, and deployed a mobile application (the Street Peace app) to support street outreach workers (SOWs). Three different street outreach organizations in Chicago adopted the app for two months. Results suggest that the app supported SOWs' transformative justice practices to build a counter-structure to traditional policing, which is historically oppressive to Black communities. The SOWs used the app to mediate potentially violent conflicts without police involvement, build community through in-person events, and extend their communities of care through positive stories and narratives that countered harmful stereotypes about Black criminality. By affording SOWs more agency over their communication with each other, the app enabled SOWs to connect their strengths and scale their existing practices that combat structural oppression and prefigure liberatory futures.

Cities are increasingly integrating sensing and information and communication technologies to improve municipal services, civic engagement, and quality of life for residents. Although these civic technologies have the potential to affect economic, social, and environmental factors, there has been less focus on residents of lower income communities' involvement in civic technology design. Based on two public forums held in underserved communities, we describe residents' perceptions of civic technologies in their communities and challenges that limit the technologies' viability. We found that residents viewed civic technology as a tool that should strengthen existing community assets by providing an avenue to connect assets and build upon them. We describe how an asset-based approach can move us toward designing civic technology that develops stronger relationships among community-led initiatives, and between the community and local government--- rather than a data-driven approach to civic tech that focuses on transactions between residents and city services.