It is our great pleasure to introduce this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, which focuses on contributions from the research community on Supporting Group Work (GROUP). This thriving community is home to researchers within CSCW, HCI for practice-centered computing, sociotechnical studies, and interdisciplinary groups who provide theoretical, methodological, and/or conceptual contributions on collaborative technologies and practices. GROUP's research community vividly raises the awareness of dimensions of growing importance in our highly connected lives. The idea of caring through and with technology continues to be a rich and dynamic area for research, pointing to important challenges for elderly persons, parenting, and health. The increased availability of AI-based systems leads to the development of new practices that pose increasing issues for design and regulation. The domain of social media is especially concerned with fast-evolving practices and issues that raised major interest in our community. These aspects are also approached through design fiction as a way of futures-making. Workplace and hybrid work settings show also a central area where cooperation and teams are impacted. The research papers gathered in this issue account that we live in an unprecedentedly connected world, calling for more ethical reflections about the possibilities and caveats of digital technologies. The editorial board worked hard to organize this second submission round. The call for papers for this issue on GROUP attracted a total of 109 submissions from all over the world, of which 37 papers (34%) were accepted. This issue results from the dedicated volunteer effort of 36 members of the community who served as Associate Chairs (ACs) and 87 reviewers. They all lent their expertise and time to ensure high quality reviews and provide insightful feedback to all authors. The Editorial Board can be found on GROUP's track page. As Track Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing GROUP's contributions.

Our study delves into the pivotal role of policies in the success of digital transformation initiatives, focusing on a case study of digitizing patient records at a general hospital. We aim to bridge the research gap on how policies are interpreted and applied in such projects, using a qualitative approach to understand the motivations and actions of the involved parties. By transitioning from paper to digital formats for clinical letters and test results, the project sought to optimize space and improve document access. Our findings, drawn from field notes and observations, highlight the diverse interests in digitization, from space management to policy compliance. We conclude with insights on the importance of policies in digital transformations, offering valuable lessons for future projects and digital archiving efforts.

It is our great pleasure to introduce this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, which focuses on contributions from the research community on Supporting Group Work (GROUP). This thriving community is home to researchers within CSCW, HCI for practice-centered computing, sociotechnical studies, and interdisciplinary groups who provide theoretical, methodological, and/or conceptual contributions on collaborative technologies and practices. GROUP's research community vividly raises the awareness of dimensions of growing importance in our highly connected life, as exemplified by the papers included in this issue. Information sharing and moderation in and across groups and formal organisations continue to call for complex research questions. Collaborative practices that have been the object of concern in GROUP become revisited through the lenses of new technologies, as illustrated by the papers investigating recommender systems and conversational agents in collaborative contexts. More than ever, the Internet is acknowledged as a space for social relationships, see for instance the case of dating apps or mom's chat group in this issue. Reflecting on our densely computing supported practices, ethics for research and design become an essential topic for consideration. The editorial board worked hard to organize this first submission round. The call for papers for this issue on GROUP attracted a total of 31 submissions from all over the world, of which 8 papers (25.8 %) were accepted. This issue results from the dedicated volunteer effort of 23 members of the community who served as Associate Chairs (ACs). They all lent their expertise and time to provide insightful feedback to all authors. The Editorial Board can be found on GROUP's track page. As Track Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing GROUP's contributions.

The results of CSCW studies should be more effectively incorporated into software engineering practices. This paper focuses on two concepts supporting software component choice and development in IS architecture: artifact ecologies and data work. Using a case study in telemedicine, we propose MADRAE, an extension of the UML component diagram, for modeling practice-based artifact ecologies that emphasize the necessary data work. In the hospital where we tried MADRAE, it was considered helpful by the head of the IS department to analyze existing artifact ecologies and generate design and architecture proposals.

Many features of a wheelchair affect users' actions in a manual wheelchair, determining the overall mobility performance. Based on an ethnographic study of wheelchair users in India, we develop a trajectory analysis centered on the wheelchair as an artefact and the stages in its lifecycle from design to use. This paper focuses on the decisions made and practices in the production and acquisition phases and the consequences further down the line for the end user. In particular, we focus on how different configurations of the user across production and acquisition can make it difficult for users to find a wheelchair well adapted to their situated needs once they bring the artefact into their home and daily routines.

The growing use of teleconsultation, especially since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, changes physicians' work at the hospital. In this paper, we set out to study how physicians have integrated teleconsultation into their healthcare practices. Moreover, we are interested in how teleconsultation software contributes to developing new medical practices and how the design of teleconsultation software can better support them. Based on 16 months of fieldwork in a general hospital that offers two different teleconsultation software, we have investigated teleconsultation practices through interviews and observations involving ten physicians doing teleconsultation and a telemedicine secretary. Unlike the existing informal remote care by phone, we observe that teleconsultation supports new formal healthcare practices, particularly for patient care management and inter-organizational cooperation. While analyzing the integration of teleconsultation in physicians' practices, we highlight that both pieces of software do not support those practices on equal terms according to their design. We argue that teleconsultation software design can limit the spread of these new healthcare practices and that the artifact ecology of physicians should be considered during the design process.

This paper accounts for the design process of an interactive map to foster accessibility - understood as a dialogical process - to a rural place for visually impaired people (VIP). We deeply engaged with the two concerned communities, a small group of VIP and locals from the rural village, valuing mutual sensitization and continual attunements. Framed by a relational perspective on design, we envisioned the map as a change catalyst, an artefact that can encourage VIP to engage in exploring activities, enable locals to present their territory, and contribute to ongoing reflections about accessibility by triggering exchanges about walking activities. Here we describe how this process ended-up with an object characterized by its intersecting material qualities and its capacity for mutual appropriation. We discuss the concept of boundary object as an insightful descriptor of the produced artefact and the newly identified challenge of designing accessible maps as material interventions.

Telemedicine is presented by the French government and regional authorities in France as key to guaranteeing equal access to healthcare. Research on telemedicine has highlighted how it impacts the work practices of healthcare professionals and how its adoption is challenging. In this context, we are interested in understanding how the discourses and policy on equal access to healthcare are implemented and how they impact the deployment of telemedicine solutions in practice. We are currently studying the deployment of a teleconsultation solution for nursing homes inside a group of hospitals in Northeast France. On the basis of on-site visits at four nursing homes and interviews with the different stakeholders, we analyzed the domestication of the teleconsultation solution. Our first results highlight that the defined policy is useful to support the deployment of the technology but does not appear as sufficient for its incorporation into regular work practices. Our hypothesis to understand this obstacle is that nursing homes would need to endorse a new role to engage in further incorporation and later stage of domestication, which may be prevented by their existing ecosystem.

Awareness of the huge amount of work faced by relatives in caring for a person suffering from a loss of autonomy has led to research focusing on ways to ease the burden on informal caregivers. Among them, services and devices aimed at providing social support and fighting the isolation that may be caused by the caregiving tasks appear important. However, little is known about the social support informal caregivers actually value and look for in practice. To fill this gap, we conducted a multi-sited study, focusing on older informal caregivers, because they are numerous and have lower experience with technology. Our study highlights that being part of a group is a key element in helping informal caregivers to feel that they are not alone, continue leisure activities, learn from others and sustain participation in organized activities. Through this understanding, we discuss design opportunities in a sociotechnical approach complementing online and offline social support.

We conducted a retrospective study on the experimental deployment of a telemedicine toolkit in ten nursing homes. The purpose of the experiment was to see whether the use of these toolkits could allow for better cooperation between nursing homes and the local emergency medical dispatch center to avoid sending costly vehicles and having elderly people unnecessarily discharged at the hospital. We investigated the domestication process of these toolkits by nurses and orderlies from the nursing homes. Our findings show different levels of domestication: for some of the nursing homes, the lack of practical relevance of the toolkit in emergencies and the difficulty to borrow artifacts from doctors prevented complete adoption. For three nursing homes, domestication occurred in an unexpected way in the sense that the objective of the domestication changed. These findings led us to provide recommendations for projects aimed at improving inter-organizational cooperation through artifacts.

Our research aims at informing the design of technological solutions to alleviate the stress resulting from the involvement of spouses of Alzheimer's disease patients as caregivers. For so doing, we have observed and analyzed the different offline solutions that are offered by a healthcare network in the Aube region (North-East of France). We discuss the key factors that we have identified for building an effective support network and identify five perspectives for the development of an online social support platform to lower the burden of spousal caregivers.

Increasing attention is currently paid to informal care and the physical, emotional, and psychological burden stemming from it. Research findings suggest that such a burden might be intensified when informal caregivers are at older ages. Aiming at reducing the burden associated with informal care, some research studies have focused on developing innovative technologies to support caregivers with their activities and responsibilities. These studies highlight the importance of understanding the many variables that characterise different care situations, emphasizing the relevance of user-centered and participatory design approaches. Following up the successful first edition of the CCCiC workshop held at the 2014 ACM CSCW conference in Baltimore, this workshop elaborates on the resulting roadmap for future research in the domain: concepts, methods, and technologies. This workshop seeks contributions exploring issues of collaboration and coordination for informal care addressing concepts emerging from field research, methodological challenges, work-in-progress, and the design and evaluation of technological solutions.

With the spread of ICT and the Internet during the last two decades, more and more tools rely on graphical interfaces that make them scarcely accessible to the visually impaired. The ITOIP project aims at developing the use of a tactile perceptual supplementation system called Tactos. A partnership with a visually impaired persons (VIP) association allows us to conduct a participatory design approach intended to gather first community of users around our system. This article reports on the design approach we have implemented in order to develop usable and useful applications for VIP users. Through a rapid prototyping process we address the development of the use of our technology with blind users representatives. We present the interaction and use principles highlighted from the design of three Tactos applications: a tutorial, a street maps exploration system and a country level map application.

The aim of our ongoing research project is to design a platform for family caregivers to help them cope with the burden of daily caregiving. With a view to designing relevant information and communication services, we analyzed the social support practices observed among the members of a group of caregivers, whose spouses were suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Based on interviews and a field survey, we characterized this collective and identified the caregivers' latent and expressed needs. Our approach consists in linking these needs to naturally occurring situations in order to translate them into meaningful functionalities.