Frontline workers (FLWs) in gender-based violence (GBV) service provision regularly engage in intense emotional labor to provide survivors of GBV with essential, often life-saving, services. However, FLWs experience intense burnout, resulting in turnover rates as high as 50% annually and a critical loss of services for survivors. In order to design digital burnout interventions in a context where so few exist, we recruited 15 FLWs for a 3-stage qualitative study where they used two existing applications to reflect on, and reimagine, concrete design features necessary to address FLW burnout in GBV service provision. We contribute important findings regarding designing specifically for empathy-based stress (EBS) in frontline work contexts, preferences for activities, desired interactivity, among other requirements for interventions. We synthesize our design recommendations through an example scenario of a collaborative just-in-time adaptive intervention (co-JITAI) system that integrates peer-based support that can adapt to users' changing needs and contexts over time.

Frontline workers (FLWs) provide essential services necessary for a functioning society, but the nature of their work contributes to their high rates of burnout. This burnout impacts not only their own health, but also has dire consequences for the people most in need of their services. Digital interventions for burnout may provide scalable, accessible, and cost-effective care. However, such interventions have been designed to intervene at the individual-level and have been inadequate in sustainably alleviating burnout. In addition, these interventions have not considered how we might integrate more effective organizational-level strategies or reflect FLWs' own experiences and the unique contexts of frontline work in their design. One important, yet understudied, domain of frontline work that experiences high rates of burnout is gender-based violence (GBV) service provision in nonprofit organizations. Using a community-based participatory research approach, we ran 8 co-design workshops with FLWs and supervisors from various nonprofit GBV organizations in a large metropolitan city in the United States to understand their experiences, hopes, and perceptions of technology for burnout support within their organizations. We found that participants greatly valued their support systems and supervisory relationships at work. And while there was a desire to use technology as support tools for burnout, participants were wary of how it could conflict with these support systems and important organizational values. We contribute a multilevel framework for digital burnout interventions and argue for a methodological shift to an assets-based approach, reframing the future of research and design of burnout interventions to center and reflect the needs, values, and lived experiences of FLWs.

The number of hackathon events worldwide has nearly quadrupled in the last five years. Despite exponential growth across diverse industries and increasing interest across academic disciplines, our integrated understanding of the phenomena of hackathons is limited. We conduct the first multidisciplinary literature review of publications from 1999 to 2022 to understand the conceptualization of the phenomena over time. We find that hackathon research can be categorized into 4 core areas (purpose, format, processes, and outcomes). Research was first driven by a purpose (innovation, learning, and collaboration), followed by an examination of how formats adjust to purpose to influence what happens (processes) and what is produced (outcomes), and critical reviews of the hackathon phenomena. We contribute a unifying framework with these four core areas to inform future directions of hackathon research and practice, as well as a discussion of the need for longitudinal and multidisciplinary research of hackathons.

Wearables are a potentially vital mechanism for individuals to monitor their health, track behaviors, and stay connected. Unfortunately, both price and a lack of consideration of the needs of low-SES communities have made these devices inaccessible and unusable for communities that would most substantially benefit from their affordances. To address this gap and better understand how members of low-SES communities perceive the potential benefits and barriers to using wearable devices, we conducted 19 semi-structured interviews with people from minority, high crime rate, low-SES communities. Participants emphasized a critical need for safety-related wearable devices in their communities. Still, existing tools do not yet address the specific needs of this community and are out of reach due to several barriers. We distill themes on perceived useful features and ongoing obstacles to guide a much-needed research agenda we term ’Equityware’: building wearable devices based on low-SES communities’ needs, comfortability, and limitations.

Amidst recent enthusiasm for data-driven technologies in workforce development, prior HCI research has explored job seekers' perspectives to inform the design of new technologies that could support their job search. However, in practice, the process of looking for work is often embedded in local workforce development ecosystems, where networks of organizations provide a range of services, from employment consulting, to resume workshops, to job skills training programs. Although prior CSCW work has explored the role of algorithms in social services, there has been little work investigating how algorithmic systems may shape workforce development professionals' interactions with clients and how they might be better designed to complement these professionals' work and responsibilities. To begin to address this gap, we conducted an interview study with five workforce development professionals in the US in both management and client-facing roles. Our findings contribute to research on how algorithmic systems are shaping workforce development, shedding light on the importance of the relationship building work that workforce professionals engage in with clients, the difficulty in maintaining boundaries in the face of resource and information challenges, and the ways that workforce development technologies are shaping the work of workforce development.