The introduction of algorithms into a large number of industries has already restructured the landscape of work and threatens to continue. While a growing body of CSCW research centered on the future of work has begun to document these shifts, relatively little is known about workers' experiences beyond those of platform-mediated gig workers. In this paper, we turn to a traditional work sector, Amazon fulfillment centers (FC), to deepen our field's empirical examination of algorithmic management. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, we show how FC workers react to managers' interventions, imposed productivity rates, and quantified objectification when subjected to labor-tracking systems in their physical work environments. Situating FC workers' resistance to algorithmic systems and metrics within the current CSCW literature allows us to explicate and link the nuanced practices of FC workers to the larger discourse of algorithmic control mechanisms. In addition, we show how FC workers' resistance practices are emblematic of 'work games'-a long-studied means by which workers agentically configure (''trick'') their engagement within work systems. We argue that gaining a more nuanced understanding of workers' resistance and consent in relation to algorithmic management expands our ability to critique and potentially disassemble the economic and political forces at the root of these sociotechnical labor systems.

Online social support communities can significantly improve health outcomes for individuals living with disease. Although they are well studied in the literature, little research examines how sociotechnical design changes influence the sustainability of support communities for different medical conditions. We compare the impact of a single design change on 49 disease‐specific health support forums hosted on the WebMD platform, a popular online health information service. A statistical analysis showcases changes in posting patterns before and after the design intervention; a subsequent interpretive examination of forum content reveals how the design change affected members' perceived affordances of the platform. Our findings suggest that, despite differences between communities, the design change triggered a common set of cascading effects: it made it difficult for core users to create and maintain relationships, that led them to ultimately leave the site, and, in turn, reduced the activity drawing newcomers to the platform. Using these findings, we argue that the design of sustainable and robust online communities must account for systemic, sociotechnical dynamics.

It is our pleasure to welcome you to this PACMHCI GROUP issue. For over 25 years, the GROUP research community has supported the development of robust scholarship at the intersection of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning and Socio-Technical Studies. This volume is the latest product of our efforts to validate and integrate the strong work happening within this broadly-conceived community. We hope that the range of papers presented here reflects our intent to be international, interdisciplinary, and inclusive, both in our organization of the review process as well as within the set of accepted papers. This PACMHCI journal volume in the GROUP series features studies of collaboration in multiple settings, including social media, online communities and game development. It also showcases architectures and frameworks for collaboration, and sociotechnical studies in domains ranging from sports to fake news. As Editors, we are particularly pleased to continue the legacy of presenting and disseminating the new and exciting work being developed in our community. We come together every two years to creatively display and build off of ideas from a wide range of disciplinary and topical areas including computer science, design, engineering, information science, management science, sociology, work and labor studies, and values-in-design, among others.

Wikipedia is one of the most successful online communities in history, yet it struggles to attract and retain women editors-a phenomenon known as the gender gap. We investigate this gap by focusing on the voices of experienced women Wikipedians. In this interview-based study (N=25), we identify a core theme among these voices: safety. We reveal how our participants perceive safety within their community, how they manage their safety both conceptually and physically, and how they act on this understanding to create safe spaces on and off Wikipedia. Our analysis shows Wikipedia functions as both a multidimensional and porous space encompassing a spectrum of safety. Navigating this space requires these women to employ sophisticated tactics related to identity management, boundary management, and emotion work. We conclude with a set of provocations to spur the design of future online environments that encourage equity, inclusivity, and safety for historically marginalized users.

This paper takes as its starting place the rich context of many knowledge workers today—highly distributed, increasing project focused, typically atypical days, infrastructural—and attempts to push past extant descriptions of their practices as ‘flexible’. Using empirical data informed by a practice theory lens, we expand the understanding of flexibility with regard to work by augmenting how worker disposition, as well as the ability to engage with agility in dynamic circumstances, should be considered as a factor when examining and designing for this population. We make several contributions of interest to the wider CSCW community. First, we distinguish between those who showcase flexible practices and those who proactively orient around flexibility. We call this second group ‘elastic workers’. Second, we raise new questions for us as scholars and designers keen to exploit the conceptual and pragmatic intersection of technology and work. These questions create opportunities to explore different methods for understanding complex phenomena such as flexibility, as well as understanding how we might design for this phenomenon with more foresight in the future.

We examine the concept of personal knowledge management using data drawn from our study of digital nomads. We make two contributions: an empirical and conceptual development of knowledge management as it relates to independent workers and an advancement of social informatics that builds on Gibson's ecological perspective. Digital nomads provide an empirical basis to better understand how knowledge management is shifting from organization‐centric, with its concomitant emphasis on organizational information systems, to worker‐centric, which relies on personal knowledge ecologies. We advance this concept as a combination of personal knowledge management activities and the digital technologies that support them. Our data make clear that individuals are the locus of personal knowledge ecologies, but these ecologies are embedded in a larger community of collaborators, clients, and peers who are often extensively mediated by digital technologies. This embedding and mediation are at the core of the sociotechnical arrangements that define the personal knowledge ecologies that we document.

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the first PACMHCI GROUP issue. For over 25 years, the GROUP research community has supported the development of robust scholarship at the intersection of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning and Socio-Technical Studies. This volume is the latest product of our efforts to validate and integrate the strong work happening within this broadly-conceived community. We hope that the range of papers presented here reflects our intent to be international, interdisciplinary, and inclusive, both in our organization of the review process as well as within the set of accepted papers. This first PACM journal volume in the GROUP series features studies of collaboration in multiple settings, including social networks, editing systems, and mixed reality. It also showcases sociotechnical studies in domains ranging from outdoor activities to scientific projects.

The rise of co-working and co-living spaces, as well as related shared spaces such as makerspaces and hackerspaces-a group we refer to as various types of "co-spaces" - has helped facilitate a parallel expansion of the "digital nomad (DN)" lifestyle. Digital nomads, colloquially, are those individuals that leverage digital infrastructures and sociotechnical systems to live location-independent lives. In this paper, we use Oldenburg's framework of a first (home), second (work), and third (social) place as an analytical lens to investigate how digital nomads understand the affordance of these different types of spaces. We present an analysis of posts and comments on the '/r/digitalnomad' subreddit, a vibrant online community where DNs ask questions and share advice about the different types of places and amenities that are necessary to pursue their digital nomad lifestyle. We found that places are often assessed positively or negatively relative to one primary characteristic: either they provide a means for nomads to maintain a clear separation between the social and professional aspects of their lives, or they provide a means to merge these aspects together. Digital nomads that favor the first type of place tend to focus on searching for factors that they feel will promote their own work productivity, whereas DNs that favor the second type of place tend to focus on factors that they feel will allow them to balance their work and social lives. We also build on linkages between the notion of a third place and the more recent theoretical construct of social infrastructure. Ultimately, we demonstrate how DNs' interests in co-spaces provide a kind of edge-case for CSCW and HCI scholars to explore how sociotechnical systems, such as variants of co-spaces, inform one another as well as signify important details regarding new ways of living and engaging with technology.

This all-day workshop aims to promote convergence among its participants on research related to working with intelligent machines. We define intelligent machines as both material (e.g., robots) and immaterial (e.g., algorithms) computing technologies that can be characterized by autonomy, the ability to learn, and the ability to interact with other systems and with humans. The workshop has three goals: identifying specific research problems around work and intelligent machines, developing a common language base that can facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers, and identifying information and cyber-infrastructure needs to support convergent research. Workshop activities will facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue and strive to generate high-impact research ideas to advance each of these goals.

Highly mobile knowledge workers spend a large portion of their time traversing within and among different infrastructural configurations as they move through space. These dynamic configurations are experienced as either technological or contextual constraints, which range from forms of technological exclusion and infrastructural disconnection to divides caused by both spatial and organizational boundaries. The workaday nature of these constrained environments force mobile workers to engage in a type of articulation work that involves the construction of bridging, assembling, or circumventing solutions to repeatedly negotiate these impediments. Engaging in these 'infrastructuring' practices requires that workers develop 'infrastructural competence'-knowledge of the generative possibilities of infrastructural seams. In effect, this renders mobile workers as infrastructural bricoleurs. We discuss the implications of this required competence and speculate regarding its origin, maintenance, and differentiation among professions.

This note explores the issue of women's participation in Wikipedia through the lens of emotional labor. Using a grounded theory approach, we detail the kinds of tasks women Wikipedians choose to do and explore why they choose the work they do. We also explore the emotional costs of their labor and their strategies for coping. Our analysis of 20 interviews leads us to posit that the gendered and emotional labor required of many women to participate in Wikipedia's production renders it, problematically, a space of conflicting public and private spheres, motivated by antithetical open and closed values. In addition to other contributions, we believe this insight sheds light on some of the complex dynamics behind Wikipedia's observed gender gap.

While some in the CSCW community have researched the values in technology design and engineering practices, the underlying ideologies that reinforce and protect those values remain under-explored. This paper seeks to address this gap by identifying a common ideological framework that appears across four engineering endeavors: the OLPC Project, the National Day of Civic Hacking, the Fixit Clinic, and the Stanford d.school. We found that all four of these communities utilized elements of religious practice to affirm their membership and shared vision. We describe the forms of worship we saw in these engineering worlds, their practices of evangelism, and the ways in which they addressed doubt. We also demonstrate the role mythologies play as ideologically charged narratives. Our discussion of these parallels illuminates the extent and consequences of quasi-religious practices in engineering worlds and illustrates the utility of using religion as a "lens" for understanding ideological commitments in engineering culture.

In this paper, we introduce the notion of a temporal logic to characterize sets of organizing principles that perpetuate particular orientations to the lived experience of time. We identify a dominant temporal logic, circumscribed time, which has legitimated time as chunkable, single-purpose, linear, and ownable. We juxtapose this logic with the temporal experiences of participants in three ethnographic datasets to identify a set of alternative understandings of time -- that it is also spectral, mosaic, rhythmic, and obligated. We call this understanding porous time. We posit porous time as an expansion of circumscribed time in order to provoke reflection on how temporal logics underpin the ways that people orient to each other, research and design technologies, and normalize visions of success in contemporary life.

Constant connectivity and total availability to clients is the rule rather than the exception in many contemporary workplaces. Enabled by developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs), total availability of employees is possible and presumed. Scholars have explored how new technological affordances, cultural shifts, individual personality traits, and/or the development of social expectations that reinforce norms of constant connectivity have led to this state of affairs. We argue that a key factor has been overlooked in current scholarship about stress, intensive work, and constant connectivity. That is, current economic conditions are creating a marketplace in which firms increasing sell the availability of their employees as part of the services offered by the firm. In this paper we use qualitative data to illustrate how total availability is an integral aspect of the 'product' offered by professional service firms and is becoming increasingly prevalent in other service industries. We conclude with a discussion of how the HCI community might address this situation as a design challenge. Drawing on the work of Goffman and Perlow, we suggest that designers attend to the ways in which organizations might maintain front stage impressions of total availability while collectively managing individual time to restrict total availability behind the scenes.

This paper examines the use of cultural probes as a method for fostering collaboration within groups of diverse experts working on creative projects. Using two case examples, we show that probes -- short, oblique, and at times whimsical sets of activity prompts - have boundary object properties that can jumpstart interdisciplinary and cross-functional exchange. The first case explores how social scientists and designers used a smartphone-based scavenger hunt activity to gather insights for a workshop on organizational innovation. The second case examines how artist/scientist pairs utilized probe-like prompts to develop short performances for an arts festival. Drawing together theoretical views on boundary objects and cultural probes, we suggest that designed experiences such as probes can create opportunities for both boundary work and the establishment of common ground, which is increasingly vital in the highly collaborative contexts that define work today.

In this poster, we describe the current findings of a work-in-progress that seeks to understand the normative climate that arises within user-generated media communities when contributions are interpreted as stolen or otherwise misappropriated. We outline our data collection on the photosharing service flickr.com and then briefly discuss the emergent categories of user response to perceived unauthorized reuse that appear within our sample.