Home care workers (HCWs) deliver essential health services within patients’ homes and are an important part of the US healthcare system. Yet, they are a marginalized workforce, whose physical isolation and lack of access to support structures make them vulnerable to exploitation. Computer-mediated support programs may help bridge this gap and, through critical and liberatory pedagogies, foster material social change. However, such pedagogies typically assume the involvement of a professional facilitator when, in practice, support programs are often led by peers with little to no facilitation training. Based on a three-month study with HCWs, this paper explores how peers can perform critical and liberatory facilitation practice in an online support program. We illustrate the challenges peers faced learning this practice and performing this role in an online environment. Our findings can improve the design of computer-mediated support programs and how to prepare peer leadership, particularly for addressing the needs of marginalized populations.

Home care workers (HCWs) provide essential care in patients' homes but are often underappreciated and work in stressful and isolated environments with diverse and intersecting support needs. This paper describes a computer-mediated peer support program that centers around sharing circles: spaces for personal, narrative storytelling to encourage HCWs to collaboratively reflect on their home care experiences and build rapport and shared identity with their peers. We describe the design of this program and a 12-week deployment that we conducted to evaluate the program with 42 HCWs in New York City. Our findings show that participants engaged in multiple types of peer support including emotional validation, learning how to navigate the workplace and patient care, defining and enabling good home care praxis, and building understanding around purpose and identity as HCWs. We discuss how these findings inform the design of technology and use of holistic pedagogies, such as storytelling, to enable this support in computer-mediated peer support programs. Such programs can help researchers and practitioners interested in addressing diverse needs that occur in intersectional contexts, such as that of HCWs and other marginalized populations.

Home care workers (HCWs) are increasingly central to post-acute and long-term health services in the United States. Despite being a critical component of the day-to-day care of home-dwelling adults, these workers often feel underappreciated and isolated on the job and come from low-income and marginalized backgrounds. Leveraging the support of peers is one potential way to empower HCWs, but peer support encompasses a broad range of activities and aspects. Traditional conceptions of workplace support may not be appropriate to the home care context, as HCWs are a distributed workforce who have few opportunities to interact with each other. In this study, we explore how HCWs value and conceptualize peer support. Our findings demonstrate the importance of peer support in performing the emotional labor of home care work and ongoing attempts to strategically frame the home care profession as essential and medical in nature. Our results ground design implications for technology-enabled peer support based on the power dynamics of our participants' context and allow us to engage with issues where technology design for empowerment intersects with exploitation in distributed or crowd work, emotional labor, and tacit knowledge.

ICTD is a field with a long history of interventionist research in a broad set of domains, including health, agriculture, education, and civics. A common thread between many of these interventions is that they addressed the knowledge and actions of practitioners who were engaged in development activities in their contexts. In this paper, I survey the past literature of ICTD interventions targeting practitioners to identify a common typology that spans domain and context. I use Lave and Wenger's Communities of Practice (CoP) theory as a way to understand the situated and social aspects of practice and describe how ICTD interventions have often engaged with such communities. I discuss how a CoP lens may intersect with other theoretical lenses in ICTD and related fields, specifically around concepts of agency, intrinsic motivation, amplification, and sustainability. I describe how such intersections may inform future interventionist research in the Global South.

In Cameroon, no exam is more important than the baccalauréat, which serves as the gateway to adulthood and professional and higher-education aspirations. We build on existing literature on the benefits of practice tests to evaluate how SMS-based quizzes could help students in their final year of secondary school prepare for the baccalauréat. Students in 23 schools across Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, received multiple-choice questions four times per week for nine weeks leading up to the exam date. We examined baccalauréat pass rates and student feedback through 11 focus groups. We find that students used our practice tests for formative assessment and as a prompt for recall and review of study material. SMS-based quizzes were not isolated artifacts but were shared in the students' networks, built a distributed learning environment, and used as a focus of collaborative study sessions.

We created a quiz-based intervention to help secondary school students in Cameroon with exam practice. We sent regularly-spaced, multiple-choice questions to students' own mobile devices and examined factors which influenced quiz participation. These quizzes were delivered via either SMS or WhatsApp per each student's preference. We conducted a 3-week deployment with 546 students at 3 schools during their month of independent study prior to their graduating exam. We found that participation rates were heavily impacted by trust in the intervening organization and perceptions of personal security in the socio-technical environment. Parents also played a key gate-keeping role on students' digital activities. We describe how this role - along with different perceptions of smartphones versus basic phones - may manifest in lower participation rates among WhatsApp-based users as compared to SMS. Finally, we discuss design implications for future educational interventions that target students' personal cellphones outside of the classroom.

We present our experiences with an SMS-based system for providing transit information based solely on existing cellular and GPS networks. The aim is to permit the development of information services that do not rely on a central authority or complex web hosting. We developed and applied our system to the network of privately-run marshrutka buses in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. However, our goal is to more broadly address issues of ad-hoc shared transportation systems in the developing world. A custom designed GPS-GSM unit is placed on a vehicle, and users can query our server over SMS with their own non-GPS-enabled cell phones. We report on the accuracy of our location naming approach and estimates of bus arrival times. In addition, we summarize interviews with bus drivers and bus riders relating their views of the system and outline directions for future work. Our system is a grassroots solution to the persistent lack of transport information in developing countries.

This work consists of two main components: (a) a longitudinal ethnographic study in Kyrgyzstan that demonstrates the importance of transportation resources in the developing world and how to plan for an appropriate ICT solution, and (b) the results of a proof-of-concept system engineered to create a bottom-up, transportation information infrastructure using only GPS and SMS. Transportation is a very important shared resource; enabling efficient and effective use of such resources aids overall development goals.