While study abroad experiences have valuable benefits for students, computer and information science students study abroad at much lower rates than in many other disciplines. This paper presents a new study abroad course designed to increase the opportunities for computer and information science students to study abroad. ''Defamiliarizing Data: The Ethnography and Design of Making Data Strange'' supports a breadth of learning objectives in computer and information science that are specifically tailored to the global and cross-cultural context, including supporting the development of intercultural competence, examining the opportunities and pitfalls of the globalization of technology, and applying techniques of defamiliarization to the study and design of computing systems.

Intercultural competence is a critical area of focus in higher education as it enables individuals to navigate and succeed in culturally diverse environments. This crucial competence is essential for both personal development and professional success, particularly in information and computer science, where students are likely to contribute to the creation of computing and information systems that will have global impact. Study abroad programs are designed to provide students with first-hand exposure to different cultures, languages, and ways of life, making them an ideal setting for developing intercultural competence. And yet, there is relatively little research about study abroad programs in computer and information science or about the development of intercultural competence in students in these fields. This research begins to address this gap by undertaking a study of the development of each of the six components of intercultural competence through analysis of student reflections about their intercultural experiences with data during an information science study abroad course.

The refugee support ecosystem in the U.S.-Mexico Borderplex is resource-scarce, dynamic, and transitional, requiring intensive information work. To address coordination challenges among the cross-sector sociotechnical community working at one of the largest ports of entry for asylum seekers, the county government of El Paso, TX, USA, has proposed a centralized information system for use by all refugee-serving organizations on the U.S. side of the border. However, stakeholder responses have varied, with some organizations approving, and others resisting the proposal. This research investigates the nuanced dynamics of information infrastructures among stakeholders from different refugee-serving organizations working in the Borderplex, explaining how they navigate pressures to centralize their information infrastructures amid myriad concerns while considering the costs of not doing so, particularly for the refugees. Through a combination of ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and thematic analysis, we explore why some of the organizations in the Borderplex are choosing to silo their data—in support of financial freedom, mission malleability, and maintaining privacy in a liminal context—as a form of infrastructural activism. Our findings contribute to discussions of non-use and deliberate disconnection, highlighting the complex political and practical dimensions of technology (non-)adoption.

Frontline staff of emergency shelters face challenges such as vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and burnout. The technology they use is often not designed for their unique needs, and can feel burdensome on top of their already cognitively and emotionally taxing work. While existing literature focuses on data-driven technologies that automate or streamline frontline decision-making about vulnerable individuals, we discuss scenarios in which staff may resist such automation. We then suggest how data-driven technologies can better align with their human-centred decision-making processes. This paper presents findings from a qualitative fieldwork study conducted from 2022 to 2024 at a large emergency shelter in Canada. The goal of this fieldwork was to co-design, develop, and deploy an interactive data-navigation interface that supports frontline staff when making collaborative, high-stakes decisions about individuals experiencing homelessness. By reflecting on this fieldwork, we contribute insight into the role that administrative shelter data play during decision-making, and unpack staff members' apparent reluctance to outsource decisions about vulnerable individuals to data systems. Our findings suggest a ''data-outsourcing continuum,'' which we discuss in terms of how designers may create technologies to support compassionate, data-driven decision-making in nonprofit domains.

There has been a call to develop more culturally sensitive designs for mental health technologies to ensure that the needs of diverse communities are met. We conducted an interview study with multiple stakeholders-clients from the Hispanic community (N=10), mental health therapists (N=10), and technology designers (N=5)-to identify benefits and challenges of accessing and using teletherapy for the Hispanic community. We identified four use and access barriers: connectivity and digital literacy barriers, safety barriers, technology exploitation barriers, and cultural and language barriers. We then discuss how these barriers could be addressed by using five elements derived from culturally competent frameworks from the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and the American Psychological Association (APA). We offer design guidelines for developing culturally sensitive technologies based on each of the five elements of culturally competent mental health technologies.

Algorithmic fairness in the context of personalized recommendation presents significantly different challenges to those commonly encountered in classification tasks. Researchers studying classification have generally considered fairness to be a matter of achieving equality of outcomes (or some other metric) between a protected and unprotected group and built algorithmic interventions on this basis. We argue that fairness in real-world application settings in general, and especially in the context of personalized recommendation, is much more complex and multi-faceted, requiring a more general approach. To address the fundamental problem of fairness in the presence of multiple stakeholders, with different definitions of fairness, we propose the Social Choice for Recommendation Under Fairness–Dynamic architecture, which formalizes multistakeholder fairness in recommender systems as a two-stage social choice problem. In particular, we express recommendation fairness as a combination of an allocation and an aggregation problem, which integrate both fairness concerns and personalized recommendation provisions, and derive new recommendation techniques based on this formulation. We demonstrate the ability of our framework to dynamically incorporate multiple fairness concerns using both real-world and synthetic datasets.

Algorithmic fairness in recommender systems requires close attention to the needs of a diverse set of stakeholders that may have competing interests. Previous work in this area has often been limited by fixed, single-objective definitions of fairness, built into algorithms or optimization criteria that are applied to a single fairness dimension or, at most, applied identically across dimensions. These narrow conceptualizations limit the ability to adapt fairness-aware solutions to the wide range of stakeholder needs and fairness definitions that arise in practice. Our work approaches recommendation fairness from the standpoint of computational social choice, using a multi-agent framework. In this paper, we explore the properties of different social choice mechanisms and demonstrate the successful integration of multiple, heterogeneous fairness definitions across multiple data sets.

Many computer and information science educators wish to incorporate experiential education pedagogies such as study abroad, service learning and internships into their courses because of the profound benefits they can provide for students. However, some experiential approaches come with costs - whether temporal or financial. In this paper, we present the results of a literature review of different experiential pedagogies in computer and information science - service learning, study abroad, educational work experiences, and hackathons. We provide an overview of the benefits and costs of each pedagogy, and investigate what strategies have been used to minimize the costs to both students and faculty. Our analysis uncovers a variety of ways that faculty have experimented with "bite-sized" experiential pedagogies to make them more accessible for both students and faculty. We provide examples of these strategies as inspiration for faculty to sample these high-impact pedagogies, but highlight the gap in empirical evaluation that is needed to fully understand the cost-benefit tradeoffs.

Service learning is an experiential pedagogy in which students learn through providing services or products for community partners. Computer and information science students can develop valuable products for community organizations. However, while service learning is shown to serve students and has potential to serve the field's diversity goals, community partners' needs are often not served. We explored this asymmetry using an exploratory survey. Faculty from across the U.S. were able to describe learning goals for students, including how they were assessed. In contrast, fewer than half of respondents had explicit partner goals; partner goals were often not assessed. Also, most respondents judged reaching student goals as more important than partner goals, with about 25% of respondents seeing benefits to partners as only a bonus. Faculty justified their choices by appealing to their mission as educators. Yet for a nontrivial partnership commitment under condition of scarce resources, the community partner may be seen as being taken advantage of, which may explain why some respondents have difficulty finding or keeping partners. Further, faculty may not accomplish civic duty goals, since students may tacitly learn that community organizations' needs are secondary. To aid faculty in making decisions and better integrating community partners' needs, we offer advice from survey respondents.

The benefits of service learning in computer and information science (CIS) are believed to be significant, ranging from providing students with real-world experiences to retaining students to positively impacting community partners. Although there are many benefits of service learning, the CIS domain does impose unique costs for integrating service learning into the curriculum. Yet there is little systematic research to help the CIS community understand best practices for maximizing benefits while minimizing costs. Experience reports about service learning courses in CIS have appeared in the literature annually since 2000, and thus we address this gap in knowledge by conducting a systematic review and content analysis of 84 experience reports from the The ACM Guide to Computing Literature . We synthesize the current state of service learning in CIS as well as derive recommendations for best practices and future research directions.

Organizations like businesses, governments, and nonprofits often have established milestones to stay focused on their strategic goals. However, public and social sector organizations often have goals that are difficult to measure. To better understand how data can be more sensitively appropriated in difficult-to-measure contexts, we conducted design workshops with 25 individuals with a stake in how homelessness is measured - including funders, staff and people experiencing homelessness. This study provides a detailed account of how diverse stakeholders measure progress towards these often difficult and vague goals. We found that the approaches to data collection fall under either the sociocentric perspective (which seeks to answer questions about community-level impact) or the egocentric perspective (which focuses more on the experience of the individual experiencing homelessness). We argue that in contexts where goals are vague and difficult to observe or measure, collaborative information systems should be approached by combining the sociocentric and egocentric perspectives into an oligopticon, rather than focusing only on the sociocentric perspective (which can be understood as a panopticon). As we outline, oligopticonic information systems have the capacity to deal with more diverse types of data and experiences by embracing the requirements that we have outlined.

In this paper, we present the results of a study that examines the role of data in nonprofit advocacy work. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 individuals who play critical roles in the data work of 18 different advocacy organizations. Our analysis reveals five key stakeholders in advocacy data work-beneficiaries, policymakers, funding and partner organizations, gatekeepers, and local publics. It also contributes a framework of four functions of data work in nonprofit organizations-data as amplifier, activator, legitimizer, and incubator. We characterize the challenges in data work that exist, particularly in widespread attempts to reappropriate data work across functions. These challenges in reappropriation are often rooted in participants' effects to enact data feminist principles from the margins of the data economy. Finally, we discuss how nonprofit institutions operate outside of the dominant data work goals known as the three Ss (surveillance, selling, and science) and propose a fourth S, social good, that is working to challenge the norms of the data economy and should be considered in research regarding the data economy moving forward.

Data are wielded to shape public opinion, particularly in electoral contexts where the role and veracity of information is questioned. This post-truth era is characterized by world events in which facts too often are obfuscated and evidential standards are abandoned. To study how data are used to influence pressing and divisive contemporary issues, this paper explores the rhetorical work that quantitative data are doing through the blogging practices of advocacy organizations during the highly-polarized month preceding the 2016 United States elections. We present results of a qualitative content analysis of the quantitative data used in 337 blog posts published by five pairs of conservative and liberal advocacy organizations over the course of the month leading up to the 2016 US elections. We identify key data rhetoric practices along partisan lines and contribute an analytic framework-evaluating ethos, pathos, and logos- that can be used to analyze the rhetorical use of data in other contexts. We then characterize two different imaginaries that come into conflict in this research: 1) the political imaginaries being promoted through organizational blogging and 2) the sociotechnical imaginary of the data economy, foregrounding differences in the epistemic value of data in each. We conclude by outlining research challenges and trajectories for future research within each of the two imaginaries of data.

Graduate students are facing a mental health crisis due to a combination of individual, community, and societal factors. Many existing stress management interventions engage with one factor at a time, typically focusing on providing a user with data about their stress state. We conducted co-design workshops with graduate students who work closely together to explore their strategies for managing stress and to learn about what types of technologies they envision to help address their stress. Using Ecological Systems Theory as an conceptual framework, our analysis of the designs and discussions from these workshops contributes an expanded design space for stress management—one that foregrounds the affordances and challenges of designing interventions that cut across ecological systems levels along with designs that approach stress management using a broader diversity of strategies: controlling, disconnecting, and normalizing stress. We argue that this expanded design space embraces a more holistic and human approach to designing stress management technologies.

Service learning-an educational experience in which students provide service to a community partner while learning content knowledge, professional skills, and critical thinking-can provide significant benefits to students and the community. We present survey results from 227 postsecondary students in computing to provide insights into their attitudes toward service learning, and how these relate to course-taking motivations and sense of civic duty. Based on the survey results, we argue that service learning should be required in an undergraduate computing major. However, we problematize this provocation based on three types of pitfalls: courses that do not prepare students to understand social contexts in which technical solutions are promoted, lack of resources for faculty teaching the courses, and the potential to harm both community partners and students.

Global crowdsourcing teams who conduct humanitarian response use temporal narratives as a sensemaking device when time is a critical element of the data story. In dynamic situations in which the flow of online information is rapid, fluid, and disordered, the process of how distributed teams construct a temporal narrative is not well understood nor well supported by information and communication technologies (ICTs). Here, we examine an intense need for temporal sensemaking: time- and safety-critical information work during the 2017 Hurricane Maria crisis response in Puerto Rico. Our analysis of semi-structured interviews reveals how members of a global digital humanitarian group, The Standby Task Force (SBTF), use a process of triage, evaluation, negotiation, and synchronization to construct collective temporal narratives in their high-tempo, distributed information work. Informed by these empirical insights, we reflect on the design implications for cloud-based, collaborative ICTs used in time- and safety-critical remote work.

While the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic is the most widespread and longest lasting educational disruption of the modern era, it joins a host of other natural and human-made crises affecting university education, such as Hurricane María in Puerto Rico (2017), the Islamic State's closure of Al-Furat University in Syria (2014), Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (2005), and many others. For service learning classes, generally defined as students learning as they provide service to a community partner, these large scale disruptions create special challenges even when it is possible to move classes online. The COVID-19 pandemic seriously affected the active involvement of community partners, including non-profit organizations, local schools and hospitals, and local governments. Many community organizations struggled to meet increased demand for their assistance while simultaneously cutting personnel due to budget shortfalls. In this paper, we report results from 34 survey respondents who offered service learning classes in undergraduate computer and information science during spring 2020. Despite the turmoil, only three faculty respondents lost their community partner entirely. In response to disruption, nearly half of faculty removed some of the assignments’ requirements, while others made the service project optional or removed it completely. Going online negatively affected students’ ability to collaborate with each other and interact with community partners, activities that are considered important for reaching learning outcomes for service learning. Nevertheless, about two-thirds of faculty reported that their students completed their service assignments and described conditions that led to or detracted from their success. Based on the findings, the authors present several implications for development of future computer and information science service learning offerings that are resilient during times of crisis.

Numerous studies have highlighted a range of potential benefits of teletherapy for clients. Nonetheless, researchers have found that many therapists are reluctant to adopt teletherapy in their work practice. There is a dearth of research about how therapists have appropriated telehealth platforms, either to understand teletherapy practice or to understand the challenges and opportunities for system design. The COVID-19 pandemic offers an unfortunate but unique opportunity to learn more about the experiences of therapists who use a range of therapeutic interventions with a range of client populations. In this work, we explore the following research question: in what ways do telehealth platforms support and challenge the work of teletherapy? We present results of semi-structured interviews conducted with 14 mental health therapists during the first six months of the pandemic in the United States. We present a descriptive account of their experiences as well as a discussion of the ways in which the multi-layered and interdependent nature of two facets of therapeutic work---the therapeutic alliance and the therapeutic interventions---made the transition to computer-supported cooperative work particularly challenging. We then offer a suite of design implications for systems that better support the nuanced and unique work of teletherapy.

The prevalence of HCI research carried out with nonprofit organizations has increased dramatically over the past 35 years. Despite this history and our accumulating understanding of social sector organizations and their diverse stakeholders’ use of technology, there have not yet been any systematic reviews of this body of research. Before making more holistic claims about what this body of knowledge might suggest for a research agenda moving forward, we carry out a systematic literature review to characterize the systemic biases that are present as a result of the varying degrees of inclusion or exclusion of the voices of different groups of stakeholders. Building off of the results of our analysis, we contribute a framework of Analytic Charismas for more broadly engaging in reflexivity as a discipline.

The premise of a primary key is simple enough: every record or row in a table should have some number or string that can uniquely identify it. Primary keys are essential for linking data spread across database tables, and for looking up and retrieving data from specific records. Yet for an identifier that seems so straightforward and uncontroversial, we find myriad ways that this unassuming bit of infrastructure has an outsized influence in human services work. Through case studies of the organizational networks of two nonprofit human services organizations, we find that different stakeholders use variants of identifiers to support work practices that are far more complex and social than the linking of tables or the lookup of data. Yet we also find that the low-level technical properties of the primary key are often coercive, forcing end-users to work on the infrastructure's terms-influencing the nature and order of the work, creating new forms of work, and influencing the tenor of the relationships among stakeholders. The technical abstractions of the underlying infrastructure, then, start to become the de facto public policy. We conclude by offering design provocations for better supporting identification across a variety of contexts.

Temporal coordination endures as a central topic in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) because information systems still struggle to adequately support varying representations of time in the context of collaborations that areboth temporally and geographically dispersed. Moreover, the adaptive practices of these broadly dispersed groups are still not well understood. We ask:How do globally distributed teams temporally coordinate to accomplish their work? We examine an extreme case of online temporal coordination: high-tempo information curation about the urgent humanitarian crisis following the 2017 Hurricane Maria landfall in Puerto Rico. Our analysis of synchronous chat transcripts and data artifacts produced by The Standby Task Force reveals how this digital humanitarian group establishes temporal coordination through different shared understandings of time relative to the crisis, the globally distributed work, and the collaborative information technologies. We make four contributions from our analysis: First, we developed a pluritemporal analytical framework that describes different forms of socially constructed time and disambiguates their meaning in talk. Next, we present empirical evidence of how this distributed team establishes shared temporal orders to collectively orient their work in time. Then, we describe how they reconcile multiple and conflicting instances of sociotemporal "disorder'' to enable productive work. Last, we reflect on the design implications for collaborative information systems informed by this work.

Organizations across many sectors are under intense pressure to become data-driven. Yet, for mission-driven organizations, the path to becoming and value of being data-driven is not always clear. We present results from an interview-based study of the role of data in the monitoring and evaluation practices of mission-driven organizations. Instead of leading to productive and empowering data-driven decision making, monitoring and evaluation work is characterized by the erosion of autonomy, data drift, and data fragmentation. Together, these consequences of monitoring and evaluation practices play into a cycle of increasing disempowerment for the mission-driven organization. These findings suggest that the design of information systems should work towards empowering organizations in ways that make sense for their unique data needs and those of their constituents.

In this paper, we examine the stories about philanthropic IT that circulate via product websites, marketing materials, and third-party news articles. Through a series of product-centered case studies, we surface these texts' implicit and explicit visions about the (near) future of philanthropy. We detail their prescriptions about how, why, and in service of what ends nonprofit organizations could, should, and ought to leverage IT. We also examine their underlying assumptions about philanthropy: how social good is accomplished, how philanthropic organizations are - and might be more - effective, to whom organizations and beneficiaries should be accountable, and the terms of that accountability. Analyzing these visions as design fictions, we argue that they help cultivate unrealistic anticipatory relationships to the present and entail concomitantly unrealistic imperatives for the philanthropic sector. We conclude by arguing for the crucial role of HCI scholars in disrupting these impossible futures, and by highlighting areas needing further, re-imagined, research.

The popularity of hackathons has increased as technology pervades more facets of our lives. Originally designed for programmers, hackathons are now being appropriated by new stakeholders across diverse sectors. Yet with this evolution in hackathons, we no longer adequately understand what is produced and, thereby, the value of these events. We conducted an interview study with 22 stakeholders - participants, representatives of nonprofit organizations, and organizers - of the CHI4Good Day of Service to understand what is produced through philanthropic hackathons. Whereas traditional hackathons are oriented around the production of code or prototypes, our analysis of interview data suggests that the production work of philanthropic hackathons also includes technical capacity and expertise, expanded social networks, an exposure to design process, affective experiences, and an opportunity for participants to shape their identities against a cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary backdrop. We conclude by reflecting on implications for the CHI community in carrying out philanthropic events styled after hackathons.

Prior research has drawn attention to numerous problems with ICTs designed for philanthropic contexts. Yet, little is known about how to support philanthropic work in its own right, especially as it transcends formal engagements with nonprofit organizations and suffuses everyday life. In this research, we draw on data from a 33-day mobile diary study augmented by follow-up interviews to examine the work of everyday philanthropy. By taking individuals' philanthropic work-rather than a specific technology or its users-as our unit of analysis, we establish an empirical foundation for a new design space for philanthropic informatics. Our research shows that philanthropic work is not just about transactions of money, goods, or services. Instead, we argue that a lens of care work is a more useful framing of everyday philanthropy. We also draw renewed attention to the myriad roles of institutions beyond that of a resource intermediary.

We present results of a qualitative study of the information systems used by college and university food banks and find that their inventory systems are characterized by the patchwork use of multiple units of measurement-currencies-collected at different points in their workflow for different stakeholders. Considerations of whether to track information by item count, points, monetary value, or weight are immensely political and privilege some stakeholders over others. We contribute to an emergent body of research in computer-supported cooperative work about the ways in which the politics of measurement influences the design of organizational information systems through an explanation of the ways that these different currencies embody politics and stymie design at the most mundane level of the information system-the unit of measurement.

Crowdfunding, the practice of funding a project by soliciting donations via the internet, allows organizations and individuals alike to raise funds for a variety of causes. In this paper, we present the results of a study of philanthropic crowdfunding, aimed at understanding some of the practices and needs associated with raising money for charitable causes. Our analysis highlights the diversity of stakeholders and roles in philanthropic crowdfunding and the immense amount of work associated with legitimizing many of these roles, including the fundraiser, organization, platform, and project. We introduce the construct of legitimacy work and discuss ways in which current crowdfunding systems both support and thwart this work.

We present results from a case study of the use of business intelligence systems in a human services organization. We characterize four mythologies of business intelligence that informants experience as shared organizational values and are core to their trajectory towards a "culture of data": data-driven, predictive and proactive, shared accountability, and inquisitive. Yet, for each mythology, we also discuss the ways in which being actionable is impeded by a disconnect between the aggregate views of data that allows them to identify areas of focus for decision making and the desired "drill down" views of data that would allow them to understand how to act in a data-driven context. These findings contribute initial empirical evidence for the impact of business intelligence's epistemological biases on organizations and suggest implications for the design of technologies to better support data-driven decision making.

We report on the results of a diary study of the everyday volunteering and help giving of individuals in the millennial generation. We describe the breadth of work structures implicated in volunteering, the social structures implicated in volunteering, and the interdependencies between the two. We analyze the roles that technology plays in volunteering with a particular focus on the forms of infrastructure that are constituted through the work and social structures of this philanthropic activity. Finally, we reflect on design opportunities for infrastructures where work and social structures meet to support more everyday, ubiquitous forms of volunteering.

In this paper, we describe results from fieldwork conducted at a social services site where the workers evaluate citizens' applications for food and medical assistance submitted via an e-government system. These results suggest value tensions that result - not from different stakeholders with different values - but from differences among how stakeholders enact the same shared value in practice. In the remainder of this paper, we unpack the distinct and conflicting interpretations or logics of three shared values - efficiency, access, and education. In particular, we analyze what happens when social services workers have ideas about what it means to expand access, increase efficiency, and educate the public that conflict with the logics embedded in the e-government system. By distinguishing between overarching values and specific logics, we provide an analytic framework for exploring value tensions as values are enacted in practice.

In this article, we present the results of a study examining challenges related to access and trust for nutrition assistance outreach workers and suggest design implications for these challenges. Outreach workers are e-government intermediaries who assist clients with accessing and using e-government online applications, systems, and services. E-government intermediaries are not typical end users; they use e-government systems on behalf of clients, and as such their challenges differ from those of primary users. We detail social and technical aspects of these challenges to develop a nuanced understanding of access and trust in the ecosystems surrounding e-government systems. First, we describe how the practical accomplishment of access involves multiple stakeholders, actors, and practices. Second, we highlight how trust emerges through the e-government intermediaries’ work to project themselves as professional and competent through their technical practice. Last, we propose design implications sensitive to both the social and technical aspects of these challenges.

We report on a qualitative study of the user experience of cloud-based information work. We characterize the information work practices and challenges that exist largely at the different intersections of three constructs - cloud-based services, collaborations, and digital identifiers. We also demonstrate how the misalignment of these three constructs is experienced as a "losing battle" that has led to miscommunication among collaborators, the abandonment of cloud-based services, and the irreparable blurring of digital identities.

In this paper, we present the results of a study of the work practices of food assistance outreach workers. We introduce the construct of service mediation, which includes the technical, social, and knowledge labor practices involved in enabling access to and use of an e-government service. We explore the service mediation activities of outreach, technological assistance, providing knowledge, and ongoing engagement. These activities bring to light how successful service relationships involve fostering a process, bridging relationships, and providing broader scaffolding. The results of our research highlight the role service mediation plays in the use of services and service technologies in information-rich organizations. This research extends previous conceptualizations of mediation by documenting how mediators support broader service processes for their clients, transform potential beneficiaries into clients, and engage in long term assistance. Therefore, this work moves beyond prior conceptualizations of mediation that concentrate solely on enabling access and use of specific technologies.

This paper reports the results of a study comparing the relative influence of location and shared identity in partially distributed work. Using an experimental task called Shape Factory, groups of eight participants were configured such that in the baseline 'strangers' condition only the location-based faultline was present while in the experimental 'intergroup' condition, participants from two different shared identity groups engaged in distributed collaboration, creating an additional, cross-cutting faultline. The results showed that participants in the intergroup condition, with both location-based and shared identity faultlines, performed at a higher level than participants in the strangers condition, with only the location-based faultline. In the intergroup condition, the performance effects of location and shared identity were roughly equal and did not affect each other differentially in combination.

We present the results of a qualitative study of the use of social computing technologies by volunteer coordinators at nonprofit organizations. The work of volunteer coordinators is bridge-building work - bringing together numerous public constituencies as well as constituencies within their organizations. One might expect this class of work to be well supported by social software, some of which has been found to enable bridging social capital. However, we find that, in many ways, this class of technology fails to adequately support volunteer coordinators' bridge-building work. We discuss a number of strategies for bridge-building via social computing technologies, numerous challenges faced by volunteer coordinators in their use of these technologies, and opportunities for designing social software to better support bridge-building between organizations and the public.

Many people manage a complex assortment of digital information in their lives. Volunteer coordinators at nonprofit organizations are no exception; they collectively manage information about millions of volunteers every year. Yet current information management systems are insufficient for their needs. In this paper, we present results of a qualitative study of the information management practices of volunteer coordinators. We identify the resource constraints and the diverse and fluid information needs, stakeholders, and work contexts that motivate their information management strategies. We characterize the assemblages of information systems that volunteer coordinators have created to satisfice their needs as 'homebrew databases.' Finally, we identify additional information management challenges that result from the use of these 'homebrew databases,' highlighting deficiencies in the appropriateness and usability of databases and information management systems, more generally.

Issue tracking systems help organizations manage issue reporting, assignment, tracking, resolution, and archiving. Traditionally, it is the Software Engineering community that researches issue tracking systems, where software defects are reported and tracked as 'bug reports' within an archival database. Yet, as issue tracking is fundamentally a social process, it is important to understand the design and use of issue tracking systems from that perspective. Consequently, we conducted a qualitative study of issue tracking systems as used by small, collocated software development teams. We found that an issue tracker is not just a database for tracking bugs, features, and inquiries, but also a focal point for communication and coordination for many stakeholders within and beyond the software team. Customers, project managers, quality assurance personnel, and programmers all contribute to the shared knowledge and persistent communication that exists within the issue tracking system. These results were all the more striking because in spite of teams being collocated--which afforded frequent, face-to-face communication--the issue tracker was still used as a fundamental communication channel. We articulate various real-world practices surrounding issue trackers and offer design considerations for future systems.

In this paper, we present results from a study of collocated group console gaming. We focus, in particular, on observed gaming practices that emphasized the individual gamer within a gaming group as well as practices that emphasized the gaming group as a whole. We relate each of these practices, where possible, to specific elements of the game design including game mechanics, interaction design, and special effects design. We argue that the classic distinction between competitive and cooperative modes of gameplay does not fully transfer to account for the interpersonal dynamics within collocated gaming groups.

Previous research on partially distributed teams has revealed a cluster of problems, including difficulty coordinating, 'ingroup' formation among members in different locations, and lower trust in teammates across distance. But these prior studies involved groups of strangers; would pre-existing groups have the same problems? We recruited groups from the same fraternity or sorority to test groups with a pre-existing shared identity. We found that these groups did indeed coordinate work better, cooperated more, and were more willing and able to take on larger scale projects. However, even within these high-performing shared identity groups, there were significant differences between collocated and remote members in performance, group efficacy, and sense of group identity.

In this paper, we present results from a qualitative study of collocated group console gaming. We focus on motivations for, perceptions of, and practices surrounding the shared use of console games by a variety of established groups of gamers. These groups include both intragenerational groups of youth, adults, and elders as well as intergenerational families. Our analysis highlights the numerous ways that console games serve as a computational meeting place for a diverse population of gamers.

This paper presents research analyzing the role of computational technology in the domain of nonprofit fundraising. Nonprofits are a cornerstone of many societies and are especially prominent in the United States, where $295 billion, or slightly more than 2% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (i.e. total national revenue), was directed toward charitable causes in 2006. Nonprofits afford many worthwhile endeavors, including crisis relief, basic services to those in need, public education and the arts, and preservation of the natural environment. In this paper, we identify six roles that computational technology plays in support of nonprofit fundraising and present two models characterizing technology use in this domain: (1) a cycle of technology-assisted fundraising and (2) a model of relationships among stakeholders in technology-assisted fundraising. Finally, we identify challenges and research opportunities for collaborative computing in the unique and exciting nonprofit fundraising domain.

In any collaborative system, there are both symmetries and asymmetries present in the design of the technology and in the ways that technology is appropriated. Yet media space research tends to focus more on supporting and fostering the symmetries than the asymmetries. Throughout more than 20 years of media space research, the pursuit of increased symmetry, whether achieved through technical or social means, has been a recurrent theme. The research literature on the use of contemporary awareness systems, in contrast, displays little if any of this emphasis on symmetrical use; indeed, this body of research occasionally highlights the perceived value of asymmetry. In this paper, we unpack the different forms of asymmetry present in both media spaces and contemporary awareness systems. We argue that just as asymmetry has been demonstrated to have value in contemporary awareness systems, so might asymmetry have value in media spaces and in other CSCW systems, more generally. To illustrate, we present a media space that emphasizes and embodies multiple forms of asymmetry and does so in response to the needs of a particular work context.

People use photographs for numerous reasons with one of the most common uses of both analog and digital photographs is as an artifact to share and discuss with others. While the practice of photo sharing has been thoroughly examined in the HCI community, there is currently very little research on easily capturing and sharing content within groups of collocated mobile users. In this paper we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a mobile photo sharing application, Mobiphos, that gives a group of collocated users the ability to capture and simultaneously share photos in real-time with each other.

New forms of computer-mediated communication are increasingly multimodal, providing capabilities for communicating with some combination of text, image, audio, and video. In this paper, we point to the need to develop better methods for studying multimodal communication -- more specifically, for studying thencommunicative role of and relationships among differentnmodalities within their increasingly complex, multimodal semioticnlandscapes. We present two challenges in the analysis of multimodal communication, point of view and unit of analysis, both encountered in the context of our study of the use of photo-enhanced instant messaging.

This paper presents a descriptive account of the social practices surrounding the iTunes music sharing of 13 participants in one organizational setting. Specifically, we characterize adoption, critical mass, and privacy; impression management and access control; the musical impressions of others that are created as a result of music sharing; the ways in which participants attempted to make sense of the dynamic system; and implications of the overlaid technical, musical, and corporate topologies. We interleave design implications throughout our results and relate those results to broader themes in a music sharing design space.

In this paper, we explore the use of digital photographs in computer-mediated communication. We present Lascaux, an instant messaging client that serves as a research platform for studying visual communication with digital photographs. Through a combined analysis of the uses of images in Lascaux as well as the uses of images in other communicative contexts, we arrived at six themes of appropriation: the image as amplification, the image as narrative, the image as awareness, the image as local expression, the image as invitation, and the image as object/instrument. For each theme, we explore the ways in which a medium may be designed to support that class of appropriation. Finally, we reflect on the relationship between literacy, mastery, and appropriation.

We discuss findings from observation, interviews, and textual analysis of instant messaging use in a university research lab setting. We propose a method for characterizing the tensions that permeate instant messaging texts and that expose the collision between conventions of verbal and written communication. Given this method, we suggest a design space for exploring potential design choices in instant messaging clients. Finally, we recommend an analysis of communicative conventions as a fruitful lens through which designers might anticipate or circumvent design tensions in emergent computer-mediated communication technologies