Despite being considered a fundamental issue in the design, use, and appropriation of digital technologies, IT security has found but little attention in CSCW so far. Approaches in Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering do not account appropriately for the weave of dispersed practices that it takes to 'do' IT security---practices that involve a heterogeneous set of actors and unfold at diverse sites and across organizational, legal, and professional boundaries. In this paper we propose to conceive of IT security through the lens of care, a notion that we draw from Science and Technology Studies. Caring for IT security requires continuous, often invisible work that relies upon tinkering and experimentation and addresses perennial oscillations between in-/securities. Caring for IT security, then, engages with established accountabilities and cultivates a moral stance that refrains from blaming insecurities upon single actors. We conclude with outlining a caring approach to IT security for CSCW.

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.

This paper studies how communication infrastructure is explored, examined, and evaluated by self-identifying 'security researchers' at hacking conventions. We analyze mobile phone 'security research' as a case of negotiating infrastructural repair. 'Security research' seeks to re-negotiate with industry actors what 'security' actually means, which technological 'insecurities' need mending, which bugs, mistakes, and risks should be repaired. These negotiations are tense and contested because the relations between 'security research' and industry reach across utterly different identities and commitments, spanning an arena of repair. To investigate how 'security research' situates itself in this arena, we analyze presentations about hacking mobile telephony that have been given at events organized by the Chaos Computer Club between 2000 and 2015. With the help of qualitative coding techniques, we examine the identities and commitments involved in 'security research,' the agendas that 'security research' pursues, and the ways in which it addresses and relates to industry actors. We interpret our findings in terms of friction, highlighting how a social arena of mobile phone repair is constituted through difference, rather than despite it.

This paper applies the theoretical lens of infrastructure to study hacking practices that take issue with large-scale communication networks. The paper analyzes a series of hacks targeting the Global System for Mobile Communications (i.e., networks for mobile telephony) carried out by a cluster of people affiliated or sympathetic to the German Chaos Computer Club between 2001 and 2014. These hacks aim at acquiring proprietary knowledge and facilitating the autonomous operation of local mobile phone networks for communities, independent of corporate network providers. The contribution of this paper is to show how hacking of this kind can be understood as transgressive infrastructuring, a way of engaging critically with infrastructure that, in the case of GSM hacking, relied on three strategies---reverse engineering, re-implementation, and parallel operation, all of which aim at appropriating the targeted network intellectually, legally, functionally, and/or operationally.

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.

We investigate in which forms field trials are a workable model as part of an exploratory design process for sporadic, mobile, non-work settings. A major concern of evaluating ubicomp systems is to study how practices and context of use emerge and develop over time when new technology is introduced. To introduce a sophisticated version of our own prototype in the course of an iterative design process, we conducted a public field trial of the system---a new platform for mobile democratic discussions in municipal planning---that we distributed via the Android Market. However, it turned out to be surprisingly difficult to evaluate our design in a setting that stretches over time, place, and without a preselected set of users. Analyzing our difficulties, we develop a general model for methods studying ubicomp systems. On the basis of this model, we characterize an openly interactive approach to field trials in order to look ahead rather than back.

Public Wifi hotspots in cafes and public places are based on wireless local area network technology (WLAN). In contrast to the common understanding of connecting directly to the internet when connecting to a Wifi hotspot, we are proposing to bring the original notion of connecting to a local network back to the fore. By hooking into the act of a user connecting to a local network, we see a design space emerge that allows us to spur various (off-and on-line) activities in a hyperlocal context. We propose to (re-)explore this notion of the locality of networks in the age of the ubiquitous Wifi hotspot in cafes, bars, community centers, and other (semi-)public places in order to facilitate co-located activities for such varied purposes as fostering local community, civic participation, sociality in general, and entertainment. We propose a network locality that builds on local infrastructure (WLAN) and combines personal devices (mobile phones) with stationary interactive surface technology (wall displays and tables) to facilitate social on-and off-line interactions in local settings. In this position paper, we outline technological opportunities associated with this idea as well as envisioned usage scenarios in different settings.