As civic data typically involves multiple stakeholders and institutions, data work often happens across seamful spaces. We use seams as an analytical lens to examine data production in a civic data project mapping extreme heat islands to promote environmental and climate justice. Our analysis calls attention to the work of aligning multiple infrastructures as well as the temporal and political qualities of seamful arrangements. Throughout our participation in planning and executing this civic data project, our attention was consistently called to the seams during moments of breakdown. Examining the conditions of these misalignments, we argue that seams decay as underlying infrastructures shift over time through product development, personnel turnover, and institutional change. Further analyzing the responses and maintenance work needed to sustain or re-create alignment reveals how power dynamics are reinforced or asserted at the seams. Civic design interventions must attend to these temporal and political aspects of seamful spaces when working in collaboration with other city stakeholders.

Bird collisions with man-made structures pose a significant threat to bird populations. In the U.S. South, a small group of dedicated volunteers track these deaths with hopes of advocating for local policy requiring the use of bird-safe building materials. In addition to recording observations in a mobile application, volunteers log their efforts and collect the bodies of birds they find to add to university specimen collections. We offer a detailed empirical account of the work done by volunteers to produce (1) a digital record of local bird strikes (2) a log of volunteer monitoring efforts and (3) a collection of bird specimens. Unpacking the multiple forms of data produced by volunteer efforts, we examine how Safe Flight produced data oriented towards advocacy work. We end by discussing implications for data activism, highlighting the link between materiality and charismatic data, and proposing next steps for action citizen science.

Collisions with man-made structures such as buildings, vehicles, and energy infrastructure are a significant threat to bird populations. Throughout the U.S., groups of volunteers monitor bird-building collisions to better understand the environmental impact of collisions and to advocate for the use of bird-safe building materials. The first author participated in monitoring bird-building collisions in Atlanta during the spring and fall migration seasons of 2023. This pictorial is a reflection on the experience of producing this data based on interviews with volunteers and the experiences and photographs of the first author. We contribute a rich account of the experiential elements of data production and a discussion of more-than-human entanglements in urban spaces.

Given the renewed attention on politics, values, and ethics within our field and the wider cultural milieu, now is the time to take stock of social justice research in HCI. We surveyed 124 papers explicitly pursuing social justice between 2009 and 2022 to better reflect on the current state of justice-oriented work within our discipline. We identified (1) how researchers understood the social justice-relevant harms and benefits, (2) the approaches researchers used to address harm, and (3) the tools that researchers leveraged to pursue justice. Our analysis highlights gaps in social justice work, such as the need for our community to conceptualize benefits, and identifies concrete steps the HCI community can take to pursue just futures. By providing a comprehensive overview of and reflection on HCI’s current social justice landscape, we seek to help our research community strategize, collaborate, and collectively act toward justice.

Data work is often completed by crowdworkers, who are routinely dehumanized, disempowered, and sidelined. We turn to citizen science to reimagine data work, highlighting collaborative relationships between citizen science project managers and volunteers. Though citizen science and traditional crowd work entail similar forms of data work, such as classifying or transcribing large data sets, citizen science relies on volunteer contributions rather than paid data work. We detail the work citizen science project managers did to shape volunteer experiences: aligning science goals, minimizing barriers to participation, engaging communities, communicating with volunteers, providing training and education, rewarding contributions, and reflecting on volunteer work. These management strategies created opportunities for meaningful work by cultivating intrinsic motivation and fostering collaborative work relationships but ultimately limited participation to specific data-related tasks. We recommend management tactics and task design strategies for creating meaningful work for "invisible collar" workers, an understudied class of labor in CSCW.

As data plays an increasing role in civic decision making, diverse organizations are facing pressure to engage in data work. The HCI community has explored both the potential of and challenges to integrating robust data practices in mission-driven organizations. At each step – from collection, to storage, to analysis, to maintenance – these organizations need to develop tools and practices that balance internal operational needs and external community priorities. This work reports on an 11 month-long collaboration with a mission-driven hybrid organization that has designed tools and procedures for collecting data that enact an ethic of care. This caring data practice is characterized by defining success through relationships, attending to the social and cultural community context, and protecting vulnerable populations through non-collection. We share the organization’s practices, analyze how they support the organization in providing care, and offer recommendations for building caring data systems.

In this paper, we describe and analyze the data practices of an activist non-profit, the Housing Justice League. We focus on their Tenant Power Hotline, a community outreach tool for tenants facing eviction and seeking organizing support. This research contributes to existing scholarship that examines data practices and the use of information and communication technologies in non-profit and grassroots organizations. To this existing scholarship, we share the structure of a counter-institution: an organization that strives to operate outside the non-profit industrial complex. We then interpret the work of Housing Justice League through the lens of care, identifying homebrewed databases and data fragmentations as negotiations between care and efficiency. We argue that care is enacted through the assemblage of the technical systems, and present tinkering as an alternative approach to developing data practices.?

Many organizations have adopted design processes that integrate community voices to discover the real problems that communities face. Online discussion forums offer a familiar and flexible technology that can help facilitate discussion around problems and potential solutions. However, we lack understanding about what information community members share, how that information is structured, and how social interactions affect design processes at scale. This paper presents a mixed-methods analysis of Canvas, a learning management system, which enables users to contribute to the design of the platform by sharing and deliberating on problems and solutions in a discussion forum. We collected and analyzed 1412 ideas and 18,335 associated comments shared on the Canvas discussion forum. We found that the distributed nature of design information, the presence of duplicate ideas, and contributors' gaming behaviors made it difficult for the community to make sense of the design discussion. These gaming behaviors also constitute a new concern for participatory design research. Finally, we reflect on how Canvas community members contribute information to a shared design space and how future systems could more effectively coordinate community design efforts.

Smart speakers have become pervasive in family homes, creating the potential for these devices to influence parent-child dynamics and parenting behaviors. We investigate the impact of introducing a smart speaker to 10 families with children, over four weeks. We use pre- and post- deployment interviews with the whole family and in-home audio capture of parent-child interactions with the smart speaker for our analysis. Despite the smart speaker causing occasional conflict in the home, we observed that parents lever-aged the smart speaker to further parenting goals. We found three forms of influence the smart speaker has on family dynamics: 1) fostering communication, 2) disrupting access, and 3) augmenting parenting. All of these influences arise from a communally accessible, stand-alone voice interface which democratizes family access to technology. We discuss design implications in furthering parenting practices and behaviors as the capabilities of the technology continue to improve.