Women’s entrepreneurship is a key driver of socio-economic empowerment in the Global South, yet patriarchal sociocultural contexts limit entrepreneur’s autonomy and, despite increasing attention to gender issues in HCI, shifting digital infrastructures cause privacy, security, and logistical challenges. We conduct 15 interviews with women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh who rely on digital technology, offering insight into who they are, their business and supply chains, technology use, and the gendered challenges of balancing work with family. We present women’s accounts of navigating in-person and online harassment and crime, including through payment platforms, and banking tools that legally enforce gender discrimination. We discuss how digital technology design must adapt to these pervasive issues and propose digital interventions to support developing their businesses and achieving financial independence. Our work contributes to understanding how HCI can take a transformative role in overcoming barriers and advancing mechanisms for women’s financial empowerment in the Global South.

Abstract In recent decades, the proliferation of data and advances in information technology have led organizations to value data more highly and aim to build a data culture that is suitable for promoting and sustaining data‐related strategic outcomes. However, what a “good” data culture comprises is often expressed abstractly and there is no consensus about how such a culture should manifest in practice. This study explores the key dimensions and attributes of an ideal data culture, as perceived by expert practitioners in large, data‐rich public sector organizations. Using a two‐stage Delphi method, we engaged with 14 data management experts from Aotearoa New Zealand to understand their views on achieving “Data Nirvana” in practice, focusing on the attributes that explain an ideal data culture. Five categories of ideal data culture are identified: strategic agility, ethical use, human centricity, capability, and controls and discipline. These are linked through two unifying themes: trust and trustworthiness, and value integration. The resulting framework for data culture comprises seven elements. The study provides insights into the aspirational potential of data and the realities of organizational data practice, contributing to a deeper understanding of data culture.

Abstract Disadvantaged communities often face compounded infrastructural, social, and economic barriers to accessing and utilizing information. This study investigates the information ecosystem of small‐scale fishing communities in climate‐vulnerable regions of Bangladesh, examining their information needs, access practices, and systemic constraints. Using a mixed‐methods design, we collected survey data from 520 fishing households across three districts, alongside 16 focus group discussions and 10 stakeholder interviews. Findings show that fishers primarily rely on informal networks and word‐of‐mouth, with limited use of digital tools due to affordability, low literacy, and weak infrastructure. Key information needs include fishing regulations, disaster alerts, market prices, and government assistance. However, fragmented communication channels, a lack of trust in public sources, and non‐transparent dissemination practices hinder effective access. Applying the Information Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) framework, the study identifies gaps across content delivery and governance processes. Rather than proposing a prescriptive solution, we outline an inclusive, community‐informed approach that emphasizes local influencers, improved communication practices, and trust‐building as entry points for intervention. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the information ecosystem in marginalized settings and offer practical insights for policymakers and development practitioners working to strengthen information equity and resilience in contexts marked by digital and infrastructural exclusion.

Although listening to community voice is a core value in HCI4D, we have limited methods to capture the community voice of marginalized groups within disadvantaged communities. Working with NGOs and 24 marginalized women farmers in Bangladesh, we promoted psychological safety and empowerment through our configuration of the process. Our stakeholders decided to record and produce a radio-style audio recording that presented their counter-collective narratives for development projects. We reflect on this process using the Benefits of Community Voice framework to document rich insights into community contexts, lived experiences, local knowledge, and building trust and buy-in and through interviews with three NGO workers. We discuss the fundamental need of stakeholders for a safe place to share, the value of letting stakeholders guide method selection, the significance of counter-collective narratives, the benefits of participatory audio to hear community voices for democratizing and sustaining development and design implications of our work for HCI4D.

Abstract Data culture/s as a research topic has begun to attract attention from a wide range of disciplines, albeit with inconsistent application of definitions, dimensions, and applications. This work builds on a call to investigate data culture/s within the information studies domain as a topic related to, but distinct from, information culture. The purpose of this study is to explore what is known about data culture/s in greater depth. We apply a retroductive approach to select and consider likely dimensions, inputs, and aspects of data culture/s in order to further map this construct to the literature, and thereby highlight gaps and opportunities to add to this body of knowledge. The initial candidate dimensions explored below include data‐related skills and attitudes, data sharing, data use/reuse, data ethics and governance, and a specific focus on Indigenous perspectives to provide insights on why and how a group may contest the emergent dominant discourse of data culture/s. Our conclusion highlights areas needing further research to fully define and examine the dimensions, inputs, and aspects of data culture/s, and calls for greater understanding and engagement with data culture/s from the information studies community.

Abstract Information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) is a field of research concerned with studying how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used to improve the socio‐economic situation of marginalized communities in developing countries. The authors identify the preservation of the information provided or accessed during ICT4D projects as a critical gap in ICT4D research. They argue that archival science, an information discipline concerned with the preservation of recorded information, provides theories and models that can help make ICT4D projects more sustainable. They discuss the creation of analog backups by participants in an ICT4D project in Bangladesh as an example of communities taking the initiative to remedy the limitations of an ICT4D project with simple pen and paper technology to preserve the information they wanted to keep. Conversely, they argue that insights on how marginalized communities interact with and preserve information gained through ICT4D projects can enrich archival science and foster the development of more inclusive theories and practices. Finally, they suggest areas for interdisciplinary research between ICT4D and archival science.

The rise of gig economy platforms has highlighted the impact platform and algorithm design can have upon workers’ experiences. This paper reports on an extended series of collaborative design engagements with a private company and an international non-government organisation during the production of an Interactive Voice Response component for a gig economy platform. We present the findings of a design ethnography undertaken during this process, and discuss how design decisions reflect how each party’s values, motivations and assumptions are embedded within the final technology. There exists a need for simple methods to assist practitioners to surface and critically engage with the disparate values, priorities and assumptions held by the system’s stakeholders. We demonstrate that this can be done during the production of real-world systems through the application of constrained design as a values lever, and discuss how constraint-based values levers can support critical reflection, even in resource-constrained commercial development contexts.

Smartphones are important for international development in the Global South. This paper explores how access to smartphone technologies promote women's agency for social change in these contexts by creating learning and livelihood opportunities and increasing connection with local market and service providers. The paper presents findings from a project which provided 200 Bangladeshi rural women farmers with smartphone technologies, training and support, and qualitatively investigated their ability to cope with geographic vulnerabilities, challenging market access, and social barriers. Reporting on a subset of these women's experiences, smartphone technologies helped these women gain better access to public agricultural extension and financial services, along with better acceptance from family and society. This, in turn, improved their dignity, confidence and sense of wellbeing. Insights will help ICT4D designers and development practitioners understand the importance of low-cost, bottom-up design inputs and social factors in future projects in similar developing country contexts.

While information and communication technology for development (ICTD) researchers have prioritized advocating for community voices in innovation design and development, we have limited insights into how community voices are incorporated by the high-level decision-makers who fund and initiate development projects and programs in the Global South. Indeed, understanding local communities’ voices (expressions of needs, challenges, and priorities) in tailoring effective development projects for sustainable development is widely considered an unmet goal. Using a qualitative survey of eight decision-makers (including grantmaking donors, central governments and INGOs) we explored a number of key factors, including national and global political climates, insider-outsider interactions, and evidence-based approaches that influence the high-level decision making process, workflows, and perceptions of community voice in project commissioning within Bangladesh’s public health nutrition development arena. Our findings reveal the tensions that arise among high-level decision-makers, and highlight the challenges associated with connecting with communities during development project design and implementation. We suggest broader implications and design opportunities for inventive project commissioning approaches to bridge the gap between communities and decision-makers. Our findings are of potential value for ICTD and HCI4D researchers interested in sustainable innovation and understanding and participating in the complex workflows of the project commissioning process in sustainable global development.

The growing diffusion of software in society and its influence on people demands from its creators that their work carefully considers human values such as transparency, social responsibility, and equality. But how do software practitioners address human values in software engineering practice? We interviewed 31 software practitioners from two organizations, each having a strong values framework, with the aim to understand: (a) practitioners’ perceptions of human values and their role in software engineering; (b) practices that practitioners use to address human values in software; and (c) challenges they face during this process. We report our findings from two contrasting case organizations on how practitioners “engineer” values in their unique organizational settings. We found evidence that organizational culture significantly contributes to how values are addressed in software. We summarize recommendations from the practitioners to support proactive engineering of values-conscious software.

Agile methods are predominantly focused on delivering business values. But can Agile methods be adapted to effectively address and deliver human values such as social justice, privacy, and sustainability in the software they produce Human values are what an individual or a society considers important in life. Ignoring these human values in software can pose difficulties or risks for all stakeholders (e.g., user dissatisfaction, reputation damage, financial loss). To answer this question, we selected the Scaled AgileFramework (SAFe), one of the most commonly used Agile methods in the industry, and conducted a qualitative case study to identify possible intervention points within SAFe that are the most natural to address and integrate human values in software. We present five high-level empirically-justified sets of interventions in SAFe: artefacts, roles, ceremonies, practices, and culture. We elaborate how some currentAgile artefacts (e.g., user story), roles (e.g., product owner), ceremonies (e.g., stand-up meeting), and practices (e.g., business-facing testing) in SAFe can be modified to support the inclusion of human values in software. Further, our study suggests new and exclusive values-based artefacts (e.g., legislative requirement), ceremonies (e.g., values conversation), roles (e.g., values champion), and cultural practices (e.g., induction and hiring) to be introduced in SAFe for this purpose. Guided by our findings, we argue that existingAgile methods can account for human values in software delivery with some evolutionary adaptations.

Failure to account for human values in software (e.g., equality and fairness) can result in user dissatisfaction and negative socio-economic impact. Engineering these values in software, however, requires technical and methodological support throughout the development life cycle. This paper investigates to what extent top Software Engineering (SE) conferences and journals have included research on human values in SE. We investigate the prevalence of human values in recent (2015 -- 2018) publications in these top venues. We classify these publications, based on their relevance to different values, against a widely used value structure adopted from the social sciences. Our results show that: (a) only a small proportion of the publications directly consider values, classified as directly relevant publications; (b) for the majority of the values, very few or no directly relevant publications were found; and (c) the prevalence of directly relevant publications was higher in SE conferences compared to SE journals. This paper shares these and other insights that may motivate future research on human values in software engineering.