Women make up approximately half of the workforce in ride-hailing, food delivery, and home service platforms in North America. While studies have reported that gig workers face bias, harassment, and a gender pay gap, we have limited understanding of women’s perspectives of these issues and their coping mechanisms. We interviewed 20 women gig workers to hear their unique experiences with these challenges. We found that gig platforms are gender-agnostic, meaning they do not acknowledge women’s experiences and the value they bring. By not enforcing anti-harassment policies in design, gig platforms also leave women workers vulnerable to bias and harassment. Due to the lack of support for immediate actions and in fear of losing access to work, women workers “brush off” harassment. In addition, the platforms’ dispatching and recommendation mechanisms do not acknowledge women’s contributions in perceived safety for customers and social support for peer workers.

Online peer-to-peer therapy sessions can be effective in improving people's mental well-being. However, online volunteer counselors may lack the expertise and necessary training to provide high-quality sessions, and these low-quality sessions may negatively impact volunteers' motivations as well as clients' well-being. This paper uses interviews with 20 senior online volunteer counselors to examine how they addressed challenges and acquired skills when volunteering in a large, mental-health support community - 7Cups.com. Although volunteers in this community received some training based on principles of active listening and motivational interviewing, results indicate that the training was insufficient and that volunteer counselors had to independently develop strategies to deal with specific challenges that they encountered in their volunteer work. Their strategies, however, might deviate from standard practice since they generally lacked systematic feedback from mentors or clients and, instead, relied on their personal experiences. Additionally, volunteer counselors reported having difficulty maintaining their professional boundaries with the clients. Even though training and support resources were available, they were underutilized. The results of this study have uncovered new design spaces for HCI practitioners and researchers, including social computing and artificial intelligence approaches that may provide better support to volunteer counselors in online mental health communities.

The individualistic nature of gig work allows workers to have high levels of flexibility, but it also leads to atomization, leaving them isolated from peer workers. In this paper, we employed a qualitative approach to understand how online social media groups provide informational and emotional support to physical gig workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that social media groups alleviate the atomization effect, as workers use these groups to obtain experiential knowledge from their peers, build connections, and organize collective action. However, we noted a reluctance among workers to share strategic information where there was a perceived risk of being competitively disadvantaged. In addition, we found that the diversity among gig workers has also led to limited empathy for one another, which further impedes the provision of emotional support. While social media groups could potentially become places where workers organize collective efforts, several factors, including the uncertainty of other workers' activities and the understanding of the independent contractor status, have diminished the effectiveness of efforts at collective action.

Online health communities (OHCs) have become important resources from which members can obtain social support. Since most benefits of OHCs are provided by its members, it is crucial that OHCs maintain a critical mass of active members. This paper examines temporal changes in members' participation in a cancer-orientedOHC, focusing on the changes in members' motivations and behavior as they transition from newcomers to other roles or when they ultimately leave the community. Our work used mixed methods, combining behavioral log analysis, automated content analysis, surveys and interviews. We found that shifts in members' motivations seemed to be driven by two sources: the internal dynamics common to becoming a member of most online communities and the external needs associated with their cancer journey. When members' disease-driven needs for support decreased, most members quit the site. The motivations of those who stayed shifted from receiving support to providing it to others in the community. As in many online communities, old-timers contributed the vast majority of content. However, they encountered challenges that threatened their commitment, including negative emotions related to other members' deaths, which led them to take leaves of absence from the community or to drop out permanently. Implications for the motivation changes ofOHC members are discussed.

Attracting and retaining newcomers is critical and challenging for online production communities such as Wikipedia, both because volunteers need specialized training and are likely to leave before being integrated into the community. In response to these challenges, the Wikimedia Foundation started the Wiki Education Project (Wiki Ed), an online program in which college students edit Wikipedia articles as class assignments. The Wiki Ed program incorporates many components of institutional socialization, a process many conventional organizations successfully use to integrate new employees through formalized on-boarding practices. Research has not adequately investigated whether Wiki Ed and similar programs are effective ways to integrate volunteers in online communities, and, if so, the mechanisms involved. This paper evaluates the Wiki Ed program by comparing 16,819 student editors in 770 Wiki Ed classes with new editors who joined Wikipedia in the conventional way. The evaluation shows that the Wiki Ed students did more work, improved articles more, and were more committed to Wikipedia. For example, compared to new editors who joined Wikipedia in the conventional way they were twice as likely to still be editing Wikipedia a year after their Wiki Ed class was finished. Further, students in classrooms that encouraged joint activity, a key component of institutional socialization, produced better quality work than those in classrooms where students worked independently. These findings are consistent with an interpretation that the Wiki Ed program was successful because it incorporated elements of institutionalized socialization.

People with health concerns go to online health support groups to obtain help and advice. To do so, they frequently disclose personal details, many times in public. Although research in non-health settings suggests that people self-disclose less in public than in private, this pattern may not apply to health support groups where people want to get relevant help. Our work examines how the use of private and public channels influences members' self-disclosure in an online cancer support group, and how channels moderate the influence of self-disclosure on reciprocity and receiving support. By automatically measuring people's self-disclosure at scale, we found that members of cancer support groups revealed more negative self-disclosure in the public channels compared to the private channels. Although one's self-disclosure leads others to self-disclose and to provide support, these effects were generally stronger in the private channel. These channel effects probably occur because the public channels are the primary venue for support exchange, while the private channels are mainly used for follow-up conversations. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our work.

Research in computer-supported cooperative work has historically focused on behaviors of individuals at scale, using frames of interpersonal interaction such as Goffman's theories of self-presentation. These framings result in research detailing characteristics, personal identities, and behaviors of large numbers of connected and interacting individuals, while the social identity concepts that lead to intra- and inter-group dynamics have received less attention. We argue that the emergent properties of self-categorization and social identity, which are particularly fluid and complex in online spaces, provide a complementary perspective with which to re-examine traditional topics in social computing. We discuss the applicability of the Social Identity Perspective to established and new research domains in CSCW, proposing alternative perspectives on self-presentation, social support, collaboration, conflict, and leadership. We note methodological considerations emerging from this theory. Finally, we consider how broad concepts and lessons from the Social Identity Perspective might inspire CSCW work in the future.