This paper analyzes how smart city infrastructures are planned, implemented, and scaled, even when they fail.Understanding how these processes unfold is critical for technology researchers committed to creating equitable public infrastructures.In this paper, we focus on an urban smart mobility solution called FRED, put in place to increase connectivity within downtown San Diego.We analyze it through a decade of public meetings, contract renewals, planning documents, and media coverage.Our findings show that FRED's intervention was a cover for scaling neoliberal transit privatization in San Diego.This is facilitated by the "charisma" of smart mobility technology -framed as clean and green, app-based, algorithmically optimized, and innovative -to upper-class actors like tech entrepreneurs, property developers, business leaders, and city officials.Reflecting on these insights, we explore alternative strategies that could have produced different outcomes and discuss how our case study informs new design sensibilities in civic contexts.

This paper describes how the contemporary technology innovation ecology is hostile to community-driven design. These hostilities are important to understand if we want to intervene in the policy landscape of technology innovation to support viable alternatives to big tech consolidation and more democratic ways of developing and maintaining technology. We contribute a thick description of the hostile ecologies faced by transportation workers, community organizers, and allied technology researchers as they work toward building a cooperatively-owned taxi business with a digital dispatching technology. Our findings show that the hostile innovation ecology manifests as constrained access to resources, an inequitable regulatory framework, diminished agency in the software design process, and limits to the will of our community partners. We discuss the paths toward innovation for United Taxi Workers San Diego as compared with transportation network companies (e.g. Lyft, Uber) in terms of access to funding, regulation, labor, expertise, and market. We argue that a critical examination of institutions and policies in the innovation ecology is a necessary step toward charting fair, equitable, and community-strengthening pathways for technology innovation in the future.

As crucial public functions are transferred to computer systems, emerging technologies have public implications that are often shaped beyond public influence and oversight. “Smart city” and “modernization” projects are just some examples of such transformations. This paper focuses on struggles over the acquisition, control, and maintenance of these public, digital infrastructures. We focus on the forms of HCI knowledge and practice that proved useful to a coalition of community organizations claiming rights of input into and political oversight over surveillance technology. Their claims were a response to their exclusion from decision-making about smart city implementation in San Diego. We offer tactics “from below” as a way to attune HCI to the needs and practices of those excluded from power over widespread technology infrastructures. Ultimately, we argue that HCI cultivates a variety of capacities beyond design and redesign that can strengthen struggles to shape real-world technologies from below.

Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly.

Techlash encapsulates a breaking point reached with the critique of technology companies. To investigate how this whirlwind of rage, inquiry, and accountability affects the lives of tech workers, we conducted interviews with 19 tech workers. Our methodological approach and contribution adopts a style of writing and analysis associated with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, where we focus on the affective textures of everyday life in an attempt to redirect the temptation to representational thinking to a slowed ethnographic practice. This paper dwells on the affects of tech workers facing critique and scrutiny. Through this approach, we find that emotional habitus conditions the possibilities of personal and political action and inaction in response to critique. By emotional habitus, we refer to the emotional dispositions honed among tech workers by tech culture's rationality and optimism. This habitus must shift if people are to access new ways of relating and acting. We argue for more fruitful attitudes and practices in relation to critique.

This paper investigates a hidden dimension of research with real world stakes: research subjects who care -- sometimes deeply -- about the topic of the research in which they participate. They manifest this care, we show, by managing how they are represented in the research process, by exercising politics in shaping knowledge production, and sometimes in experiencing trauma in the process. We draw first-hand reflections on participation in diversity research on Wikipedia, transforming participants from objects of study to active negotiators of research process. We depict how care, vulnerability, harm, and emotions shape ethnographic and qualitative data. We argue that, especially in reflexive cultures, research subjects are active agents with agendas, accountabilities, and political projects of their own. We propose ethics of care and collaboration to open up new possibilities for knowledge production and socio-technical intervention in HCI.

This paper argues that designers committed to advancing justice and other non-market values must attend not only to the design of objects, processes, and situations, but also to the wider economic and cultural imaginaries of design as a social role. The paper illustrates the argument through the case of Turkopticon, originally an activist tool for workers in Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), built by the authors and maintained since 2009. The paper analyzes public depictions of Turkopticon which cast designers as creative innovators and AMT workers as without agency or capacity to change their situation. We argue that designers' elevated status as workers in knowledge economies can have practical consequences for the politics of their design work. We explain the consequences of this status for Turkopticon and how we adapted our approach in response over the long term. We argue for analyses of power in design work that account for and develop counters to hegemonic beliefs and practices about design as high-status labor.

By lowering the costs of communication, the web promises to enable distributed collectives to act around shared issues. However, many collective action efforts never succeed: while the web's affordances make it easy to gather, these same decentralizing characteristics impede any focus towards action. In this paper, we study challenges to collective action efforts through the lens of online labor by engaging with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, we sought to understand online workers' unique barriers to collective action. We then created Dynamo, a platform to support the Mechanical Turk community in forming publics around issues and then mobilizing. We found that collective action publics tread a precariously narrow path between the twin perils of stalling and friction, balancing with each step between losing momentum and flaring into acrimony. However, specially structured labor to maintain efforts' forward motion can help such publics take action.

As HCI researchers have explored the possibilities of human computation, they have paid less attention to ethics and values of crowdwork. This paper offers an analysis of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a popular human computation system, as a site of technically mediated worker-employer relations. We argue that human computation currently relies on worker invisibility. We then present Turkopticon, an activist system that allows workers to publicize and evaluate their relationships with employers. As a common infrastructure, Turkopticon also enables workers to engage one another in mutual aid. We conclude by discussing the potentials and challenges of sustaining activist technologies that intervene in large, existing socio-technical systems.

As our technologies travel to new cultural contexts and our designs and methods engage new constituencies, both our design and analytical practices face significant challenges. We offer postcolonial computing as an analytical orientation to better understand these challenges. This analytic orientation inspires four key shifts in our approach to HCI4D efforts: generative models of culture, development as a historical program, uneven economic relations, and cultural epistemologies. Then, through reconsideration of the practices of engagement, articulation and translation in other contexts, we offer designers and researchers ways of understanding use and design practice to respond to global connectivity and movement.

Digital technologies have enabled new temporalities of media consumption in the home. Through a field study of home television viewing practices, we investigated temporal orderings of television watching. In contrast to traditional pictures of television use, our evidence suggests that rhythms across households play an important role in shaping television watching. Further, we found a flexibility and openness within the patterns of television viewing that we refer to as “plasticity.” Our data suggest that plasticity and rhythms co-exist and together compose the qualitative experience of domestic television time; an understanding of both aspects of temporality suggests an approach for the design of future television technologies.

Graphical virtual worlds are increasingly significant sites of collaborative interaction. Many argue that the simulation of the everyday environment makes them particularly effective for collaboration. Based on a study of visual practice in Second Life, we argue: first, that the practice of looking is more varied than it might at first seem; second, that we need to look beyond the virtual in understanding virtual worlds; and third, that implementations blend interactional practice. We suggest that the value of virtual worlds as sites of collaboration might lie more in their richness and openness to appropriation than in their simulation of everyday interaction.

The SIGCSE community has produced much analysis of the dynamics causing women to choose Computer Science in disproportionately low numbers. In truth, we have learned that the factors are complex and contextual. This panel presents dynamics affecting women in four different institutions and explores the possibilities for common solutions to unique contextual problems.In the last five years, there has been extensive attention paid to the gender-gap in computer science courses (e.g., [1, 5]). Women are not succeeding in our introductory computer science courses, nor are they continuing in the curriculum, at the same rate as men. The reasons why have much to do with the context of individual courses, which can differ markedly between institutions. This panel explores how markedly different institutions can have similar outcomes, and how there may be some cross-institutional contextual issues that we might address.We will begin presenting an analysis of the results found in one university regarding the success of women in CS. Then we will present how classroom climate and the way CS is sometimes taught can lead to negative experience of studying CS at a different institution. We will suggest that interventions are necessary while students are building images of CS. We will end by presenting such an intervention that changes the classic CS1 course, and leads to changing the focus of what we're teaching.