What challenges do volunteers providing peer support in online mental health platforms (OMHPs) face in operating and growing their communities? How could the HCI community develop human-AI systems to help? Recent work on online peer counseling has led to the development of novel AI tools for conversational interaction, but it remains unknown how such technology can fit into broader practices that include extratherapeutic tasks. In this research, we conducted interviews and design exercises with seventeen peer counselors from 7 Cups of Tea, a large online therapy and counseling platform, to design tools --- AI or not --- that resolve challenges that arise from day-to-day community practices. Participant responses suggest three classes of tools that could improve online peer counseling: real-time decision support, productivity, and management and training. Investigation of design motivations surfaced four practice-based challenges including chat interface limitations, difficulties in support seeker management, fragmented contexts of practice, and lack of visibility due to privacy concerns. Based on counselors' discussion of benefits and risks associated with AI features in the tools they designed, we offer suggestions for research on AI tools embedded within peer counseling practices, and connect our findings with broader implications about online peer counseling as a form of volunteer-based mental health practice.

Nearly 30 million people work in the foodservice and retail industries in the U.S., representing approximately 18% of the total U.S. workforce. These service-industry workers contend with pressures from algorithmic management and other workplace technologies, yet they typically do not benefit from technologies that might help foster mutual support in the way that white-collar workers do. Recently, Starbucks, a major service-industry employer, has garnered media attention for issues with understaffing, labor law violations, and algorithm-based operations. We conducted interviews with 16 Starbucks employees about their workplace issues, interactions with technology, and communication practices. These interviews illustrate how workplace technologies worsen existing issues for service-industry workers and how challenges to worker-to-worker communication reduce their capacity to rectify these issues, especially at the cross-store level. Our participants want better communication with other workers, such as through labor unions or new information and communication technologies (ICTs), to help improve their working conditions. We discuss how HCI scholars can use action research to help design localized, worker-driven ICTs to facilitate more connectivity and collaborative practices outside of the workplace. We conclude by outlining our ongoing work studying and designing ICTs for service-industry workers.

Social media feeds are deeply personal spaces that reflect individual values and preferences. However, top-down, platform-wide content algorithms can reduce users’ sense of agency and fail to account for nuanced experiences and values. Drawing on the paradigm of interactive machine teaching (IMT), an interaction framework for non-expert algorithmic adaptation, we map out a design space for teachable social media feed experiences to empower agential, personalized feed curation. To do so, we conducted a think-aloud study (N = 24) featuring four social media platforms—Instagram, Mastodon, TikTok, and Twitter—to understand key signals users leveraged to determine the value of a post in their feed. We synthesized users’ signals into taxonomies that, when combined with user interviews, inform five design principles that extend IMT into the social media setting. We finally embodied our principles into three feed designs that we present as sensitizing concepts for teachable feed experiences moving forward.

When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? To investigate these questions, we need to explore them in a particular context. In this paper, we study discussions of gun policy on Reddit, with the overarching goal of developing insights into the potential of the internet to support understanding across difference. We use two methods: a clustering analysis of Reddit posts to contribute insights about what people discuss, and an interview study of twenty Reddit users to help us understand why certain kinds of conversation take place and others don't. We find that the discussion of gun politics falls into three groups: conservative pro-gun, liberal pro-gun, and liberal anti-gun. Each type of group has its own characteristic topics. While our subjects state that they would be willing to engage with others across the ideological divide, in practice they rarely do. Subjects are siloed into like-minded subreddits through a two-pronged effect, where they are simultaneously pushed away from opposing-view communities while actively seeking belonging in like-minded ones. Another contributing factor is Reddit's "karma" mechanism: fear of being downvoted and losing karma points and social approval of peers causes our subjects to hesitate to say anything in conflict with group norms. The pseudonymous nature of discussion on Reddit plays a complex role, with some subjects finding it freeing and others fearing reprisal from others not bound by face-to-face norms of politeness. Our subjects believe that content moderation can help ameliorate these issues; however, our findings suggest that moderators need different tools to do so effectively. We conclude by suggesting platform design changes that might increase discussion across difference.

People participating in online groups often co-construct knowledge of what they believe and, sometimes, co-construct their understanding of who they are . Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 13 members of the online forum r/bisexual on Reddit, we found participants collaboratively constructing an understanding of bisexuality. We found that this knowledge-building fills an epistemic gap resulting from bisexuality often being poorly understood. When individuals do not possess knowledge key to understanding their own lives, this can be seen as hermeneutical injustice —a type of epistemic injustice. We use the lens of hermeneutical injustice to shed light on participants’ experiences on r/bisexual. Our work contributes to recent research on epistemic injustice in HCI by looking at how members of r/bisexual mitigate epistemic injustice by reclaiming residuality—the space outside the gay-straight binary. We also discuss considerations for hermeneutical injustice to inform the design of online communities and HCI research practice.

Immersive virtual reality (VR) has seen growth in usage over the last few years and that growth is expected to accelerate. Correspondingly, many VR-based online communities have begun to emerge, and several social VR applications such as AltspaceVR have gained significant popularity. However, virtual reality can be isolating. Users can meet and connect with people in VR, but inevitably, when a user removes their headset, their friends are no longer there. In this paper, we look at how communities in AltspaceVR, a popular social VR application, handle this challenge. We conduct fourteen interviews and over 70 hours of participant observation and find that AltspaceVR users and communities have turned to Discord to solve many of their needs, such as facilitating more ubiquitous communication, planning community activities and AltspaceVR Events, and hosting casual social discussion. By using the communicative ecology model for our analysis, we find that AltspaceVR, Discord, and the communities that intersect the two have formed a tightly-coupled communicative ecology, which we call the "stage" and "theater". Discord acts as the "theater," where actors and crew collaborate and communicate to prepare for the main event, all the while building important social bonds. AltspaceVR acts as the "stage," where those efforts manifest in ephemeral but high-value experiences that bring the community together. Finally, we compare the communities we studied with those found in massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and provide insights regarding the design of social VR applications and online communities.

As video-sharing social-media platforms have increased in popularity, a 'creator economy' has emerged in which platform users make online content to share with wide audiences, often for profit. As the creator economy has risen in popularity, so have concerns of racism and discrimination on social media. Black content creators across multiple platforms have identified challenges with racism and discrimination, perpetuated by platform users, companies that collaborate with creators for sponsored content, and the algorithms governing these platforms. In this work, we provide a qualitative study of the experiences of Black content creators on one video-sharing platform, TikTok. We conduct 12 semi-structured interviews with Black TikTok content creators to understand their experiences, identify the challenges they face, and understand their perceptions of the platform. We find that some common challenges include: content moderation, monetization, harassment and bullying from viewers, lack of transparency of recommendation and filtering algorithms, and the perception that content from Black creators is treated unfairly by those algorithms. We then suggest design interventions to mitigate the challenges, bolster positive aspects, and overall cultivate an inclusive algorithmic experience for Black creators on TikTok

Large language models are increasingly mediating, modifying, and even generating messages for users, but the receivers of these messages may not be aware of the involvement of AI. To examine this emerging direction of AI-Mediated Communication (AI-MC), we investigate people’s perceptions of AI written messages. We analyze how such perceptions change in accordance with the interpersonal emphasis of a given message. We conducted both large-scale surveys and in-depth interviews to investigate how a diverse set of factors influence people’s perceived trust in AI-mediated writing of emails. We found that people’s trust in email writers decreased when they were told that AI was involved in the writing process. Surprisingly trust increased when AI was used for writing more interpersonal emails (as opposed to more transactional ones). Our study provides insights regarding how people perceive AI-MC and has practical design implications on building AI-based products to aid human interlocutors in communication1.

How do the reasons people post misinformation affect how they respond to fact checking interventions? In this research, we conducted a qualitative study of people who shared misinformation. We started with stories marked as false by a popular fact checker, Snopes, and identified people who posted those stories on Reddit. We interviewed the posters about the story they shared and their five behaviorally distinct personas: Reason to Disagree, Changed Belief, Steadfast Non-Standard Belief, Sharing to Debunk, and Sharing for Humor. Our findings suggest that research to craft better interventions to counter misinformation might benefit from tailoring to specific personas that can serve as design tools for on-going misinformation intervention research.

In the last two decades, human trafficking (where individuals are forcibly exploited for the profits of another) has seen increased attention from the artificial intelligence (AI) community. Clear focus on the ethical risks of this research is critical given that those risks are disproportionately born by already vulnerable populations. To understand and subsequently address these risks, we conducted a systematic literature review of computing research leveraging AI to combat human trafficking and apply a framework using principles from international human rights law to categorize ethical risks. This paper uncovers a number of ethical tensions including bias endemic in datasets, privacy risks stemming from data collection and reporting, and issues concerning potential misuse. We conclude by highlighting four suggestions for future research: broader use of participatory design; engaging with other forms of trafficking; developing best practices for harm prevention; and including transparent ethics disclosures in research. We find that there are significant gaps in what aspects of human trafficking researchers have focused on. Most research to date focuses on aiding criminal investigations in cases of sex trafficking, but more work is needed to support other anti-trafficking activities like supporting survivors, adequately address labor trafficking, and support more diverse survivor populations including transgender and nonbinary individuals.

Should social media platforms override a community’s self-policing when it repeatedly break rules? What actions can they consider? In light of this debate, platforms have begun experimenting with softer alternatives to outright bans. We examine one such intervention called quarantining, that impedes direct access to and promotion of controversial communities. Specifically, we present two case studies of what happened when Reddit quarantined the influential communities r/TheRedPill (TRP) and r/The_Donald (TD). Using over 85M Reddit posts, we apply causal inference methods to examine the quarantine’s effects on TRP and TD. We find that the quarantine made it more difficult to recruit new members: new user influx to TRP and TD decreased by 79.5% and 58%, respectively. Despite quarantining, existing users’ misogyny and racism levels remained unaffected. We conclude by reflecting on the effectiveness of this design friction in limiting the influence of toxic communities and discuss broader implications for content moderation.

Deplatforming refers to the permanent ban of controversial public figures with large followings on social media sites. In recent years, platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have deplatformed many influencers to curb the spread of offensive speech. We present a case study of three high-profile influencers who were deplatformed on Twitter---Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Owen Benjamin. Working with over 49M tweets, we found that deplatforming significantly reduced the number of conversations about all three individuals on Twitter. Further, analyzing the Twitter-wide activity of these influencers' supporters, we show that the overall activity and toxicity levels of supporters declined after deplatforming. We contribute a methodological framework to systematically examine the effectiveness of moderation interventions and discuss broader implications of using deplatforming as a moderation strategy.

How do people come to believe conspiracy theories, and what role does the internet play in this process as a socio-technical system? We explore these questions by examining online participants in the "chemtrails" conspiracy, the idea that visible condensation trails behind airliners are deliberately sprayed for nefarious purposes. We apply Weick's theory of sensemaking to examine the role of people's frames (beliefs and worldviews), as well as the socio-technical contexts (social interactions and technological affordances) for processing informational cues about the conspiracy. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with thirteen believers and seven ex-believers, we find that many people become curious about chemtrails after consuming rich online media, and they later find welcoming online communities to support shared beliefs and worldviews. We discuss how the socio-technical context of the internet may inadvertently trap people in a perpetual state of ambiguity that becomes reinforced through a collective sensemaking process. In addition, we show how the conspiracy offers a way for believers to express their dissatisfaction with authority, enjoy a sense of community, and find some entertainment along the way. Finally, we discuss how people's frames and the various socio-technical contexts of the internet are important in the sensemaking of debunking evidence, and how such factors may function in the rejection of conspiratorial beliefs.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can support grassroots social movements toward greateroutreach and better day-to-day communication. In this paper, we present the results of action research with alarge-scale grassroots social movement, the Southern Movement Assembly (SMA), exploring their uses andperceptions of ICTs. We find that the ICTs chosen by the SMA are often at odds with their grassroots cultureof inclusion and participation-which results in inequitable sociotechnical realities within the movement. Forexample, people with technical skills gain more power as they start to control organizational processes. Astechnical skills are most commonly associated with racial, gender, and socioeconomic privileges, this leads toinequitable participation. We conclude by calling for a grassroots culture of technology practice rooted inanalyses of systemic exclusion with a continuous effort to center the marginalized voices and experienceswith technology.

In working to rescue victims of human trafficking, law enforcement officers face a host of challenges. Working in complex, layered organizational structures, they face challenges of collaboration and communication. Online information is central to every phase of a human-trafficking investigation. With terabytes of available data such as sex work ads, policing is increasingly a big-data research problem. In this study, we interview sixteen law enforcement officers working to rescue victims of human trafficking to try to understand their computational needs. We highlight three major areas where future work in human-computer interaction can help. First, combating human trafficking requires advances in information visualization of large, complex, geospatial data, as victims are frequently forcibly moved across jurisdictions. Second, the need for unified information databases raises critical research issues of usable security and privacy. Finally, the archaic nature of information systems available to law enforcement raises policy issues regarding resource allocation for software development.

In Cuba, where internet access is severely constrained, technology enthusiasts have built StreetNet (SNET), a community network (CN) that has grown organically, reaching tens of thousands of households across Havana. Through fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2017, we investigate participants' strategies as they engage with a network where the material elements---cables, switches, nanos, and servers---are regularly breaking down. Drawing on maintenance and care (M&C) scholarship, we present an in-depth investigation of the management and anticipation of breakdowns in SNET, foregrounding the deeply relational nature of repair work, collective efforts required for SNET's M&C, and the values and motivations underpinning these practices. Our paper contributes a unique perspective on how CNs are run locally and organically, outlining considerations for how interventions along these lines might be more suitably designed. We also complicate perspectives of innovation through a discussion of cultural ideologies and tensions underpinning M&C practices.

Social norms as a regulatory mechanism often carry more weight than formal law--particularly in contexts when legal rules are gray. In online creative communities that focus on remix, community members must navigate copyright complexities regarding how they are permitted to re-use existing content. This paper focuses on one such community--transformative fandom--where strong social norms regulate behavior beyond copyright law. We conducted interviews with fan creators about their "unwritten rules" surrounding copying and remix and identified highly consistent social norms that have been remarkably effective in policing this community. In examining how these norms have formed over time, and how they are enforced, we conclude that the effectiveness of norms in encouraging cooperative behavior is due in part to a strong sense of social identity within the community. Furthermore, our findings suggest the benefits of creating formal rules within a community that support existing norms, rather than imposing rules from external sources.

Thousands of users post on Reddit every day, but a fifth of all posts are removed. How do users react to these removals? We conducted a survey of 907 Reddit users, asking them to reflect on their post removal a few hours after it happened. Examining the qualitative and quantitative responses from this survey, we present users' perceptions of the platform's moderation processes. We find that although roughly a fifth (18%) of the participants accepted that their post removal was appropriate, a majority of the participants did not --- over a third (37%) of the participants did not understand why their post was removed, and further, 29% of the participants expressed some level of frustration about the removal. We focus on factors that shape users' attitudes aboutfairness in moderation andposting again in the community. Our results indicate that users who read community guidelines or receive explanations for removal are more likely to perceive the removal as fair and post again in the future. We discuss implications for moderation practices and policies. Our findings suggest that the extra effort required to establish community guidelines and educate users with helpful feedback is worthwhile, leading to better user attitudes about fairness and propensity to post again.

When posts are removed on a social media platform, users may or may not receive an explanation. What kinds of explanations are provided? Do those explanations matter? Using a sample of 32 million Reddit posts, we characterize the removal explanations that are provided to Redditors, and link them to measures of subsequent user behaviors---including future post submissions and future post removals. Adopting a topic modeling approach, we show that removal explanations often provide information that educate users about the social norms of the community, thereby (theoretically) preparing them to become a productive member. We build regression models that show evidence of removal explanations playing a role in future user activity. Most importantly, we show that offering explanations for content moderation reduces the odds of future post removals. Additionally, explanations provided by human moderators did not have a significant advantage over explanations provided by bots for reducing future post removals. We propose design solutions that can promote the efficient use of explanation mechanisms, reflecting on how automated moderation tools can contribute to this space. Overall, our findings suggest that removal explanations may be under-utilized in moderation practices, and it is potentially worthwhile for community managers to invest time and resources into providing them.

Social movement organizing is becoming increasingly dependent on communication technologies. How can Computer-Supported Cooperative Work systems support grassroots organizations in facilitating collective action through democratic participation? In this article, we study Science for the People-Atlanta, a social movement organization dedicated to building a grassroots movement around science activism. We used action research, both participating in the organization and studying it. We use the Freirean model of participatory communication theory to unpack the movement-building process of SftP-Atlanta. The Freirean model provides a three-step, iterative process for sustainable movement building: forming a collective identity, moving toward collective action, and engaging in reflexive dialog. We analyze both the perceived strengths and weaknesses of their sociotechnical practices in supporting the organization as they iteratively go through the phases of the Freirean model. Finally, we identify inclusivity , privacy/security , and social translucence as three values desirable for sociotechnical practices of grassroots organizing.

What one may say on the internet is increasingly controlled by a mix of automated programs, and decisions made by paid and volunteer human moderators. On the popular social media site Reddit, moderators heavily rely on a configurable, automated program called “Automoderator” (or “Automod”). How do moderators use Automod? What advantages and challenges does the use of Automod present? We participated as Reddit moderators for over a year, and conducted interviews with 16 moderators to understand the use of Automod in the context of the sociotechnical system of Reddit. Our findings suggest a need for audit tools to help tune the performance of automated mechanisms, a repository for sharing tools, and improving the division of labor between human and machine decision making. We offer insights that are relevant to multiple stakeholders—creators of platforms, designers of automated regulation systems, scholars of platform governance, and content moderators.

We contribute a case study of El Paquete Semanal or "The Weekly Package" -- the pervasive, offline internet in Cuba. We conducted a qualitative inquiry of El Paquete through extensive fieldwork---interviews and observations---in Havana, Cuba. Our findings highlight the human infrastructure that supports this offline internet, rendered visible through the lens of articulation work. By offering an in-depth perspective into these workings of El Paquete, we aim to challenge established notions of what an (or the) internet "should" look like in more and less "developed" contexts. We highlight how El Paquete is a non-standardized and non-neutral internet, but still human-centered. We also offer an enriched understanding of how an entirely offline internet can provide expansive information access to support leisure and livelihood, additionally serving as a locally relevant platform that affords local participation.

Since 2014, Venezuela has experienced severe economic crisis, including scarcity of basic necessities such as food and medicine. This has resulted in over-priced goods, scams, and other forms of economic abuse. We present an investigation of Venezuelans' efforts to form an alternative, Solidarity Economy (SE) through Facebook Groups. In these groups, individuals can barter for items at fair prices. We highlight group practices and design features of Facebook Groups which support solidarity or anti-solidarity behaviors. We conclude by leveraging design principles for online communities presented by Kollock to present strategies to design more effective SEs in environments of low trust.

Norms are central to how online communities are governed. Yet, norms are also emergent, arise from interaction, and can vary significantly between communities---making them challenging to study at scale. In this paper, we study community norms on Reddit in a large-scale, empirical manner. Via 2.8M comments removed by moderators of 100 top subreddits over 10 months, we use both computational and qualitative methods to identify three types of norms: macro norms that are universal to most parts of Reddit; meso norms that are shared across certain groups of subreddits; and micro norms that are specific to individual, relatively unique subreddits. Given the size of Reddit's user base---and the wide range of topics covered by different subreddits---we argue this represents the first large-scale census of the norms in broader internet culture. In other words, these findings shed light on what Reddit values, and how widely-held those values are. We conclude by discussing implications for the design of new and existing online communities.

Online harassment is a complex and growing problem. On Twitter, one mechanism people use to avoid harassment is the blocklist , a list of accounts that are preemptively blocked from interacting with a subscriber. In this article, we present a rich description of Twitter blocklists – why they are needed, how they work, and their strengths and weaknesses in practice. Next, we use blocklists to interrogate online harassment – the forms it takes, as well as tactics used by harassers. Specifically, we interviewed both people who use blocklists to protect themselves, and people who are blocked by blocklists. We find that users are not adequately protected from harassment, and at the same time, many people feel that they are blocked unnecessarily and unfairly. Moreover, we find that not all users agree on what constitutes harassment. Based on our findings, we propose design interventions for social network sites with the aim of protecting people from harassment, while preserving freedom of speech.

Since March 2015, the public squares of Havana have been transformed from places where people stroll and children play to places where crowds gather to try to connect to the internet at all hours of the day and night. We present a field investigation of public WiFi hotspots in Havana, Cuba, and examine the possibilities of internet access these limited and expensive hotspots present to individuals, many of who are experiencing the internet for the first time. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2015-2016, we underscore the reconfigurations that have resulted from this access, as evolving internet users reconfigure their interactions with place, time, and individuals in their efforts to locate the internet. We also discuss the implications our findings have for the design of internet access interventions in Cuba and in other low-resource environments across the world, as well as the broader implications for social computing across diverse geographies.

Anonymity, ephemerality, and hyper-locality are an uncommon set of features in the design of online communities. However, these features were key to Yik Yak's initial success and popularity. In an interview-based study, we found that these three features deeply affected the identity of the community as a whole, the patterns of use, and the ways users committed to this community. We conducted interviews with 18 Yik Yak users on an urban American university campus and found that these three focal design features contributed to casual commitment, transitory use, and emergent community identity. We describe situated anonymity, which is the result of anonymity, ephemerality, and hyper-locality coexisting as focal design features of an online community. This work extends our understanding of use and identity-versus-bond based commitment, which has implications for the design and study of other atypical online communities.

When social networking sites give users granular control over their privacy settings, the result is that some content across the site is public and some is not. How might this content--or characteristics of users who post publicly versus to a limited audience--be different? If these differences exist, research studies of public content could potentially be introducing systematic bias. Via Mechanical Turk, we asked 1,815 Facebook users to share recent posts. Using qualitative coding and quantitative measures, we characterize and categorize the nature of the content. Using machine learning techniques, we analyze patterns of choices for privacy settings. Contrary to expectations, we find that content type is not a significant predictor of privacy setting; however, some demographics such as gender and age are predictive. Additionally, with consent of participants, we provide a dataset of nearly 9,000 public and non-public Facebook posts.

Online communities dedicated to the creation of fanworks (e.g., fiction or art inspired by media such as books or television shows) often serve as communities of practice for learning communication, artistic, and technical skills. In studying one successful fan fiction archive that was designed and built entirely by (predominantly women) fans, we observed processes of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) in which some of these fans began in peripheral roles and came to be more involved in the technical aspects of the archive over time. In addition to outlining positive outcomes, we discuss the challenges of supporting learning within this CoP, particularly with respect to the burden on experts. We discuss potential implications and solutions for the problem of expert scarcity in CoPs, and propose that LPP within fan communities can be leveraged for broadening participation in computing among women.

Rarely are computing systems developed entirely by members of the communities they serve, particularly when that community is underrepresented in computing. Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fan fiction archive with nearly 750,000 users and over 2 million individual works, was designed and coded primarily by women to meet the needs of the online fandom community. Their design decisions were informed by existing values and norms around issues such as accessibility, inclusivity, and identity. We conducted interviews with 28 users and developers, and with this data we detail the history and design of AO3 using the framework of feminist HCI and focusing on the successful incorporation of values into design. We conclude with considering examples of complexity in values in design work: the use of design to mitigate tensions in values and to influence value formation or change.

Although the Cuban government has tightly controlled information access for more than half a century, a small number of Cubans have access at work. In this paper, we examine Internet and social media use by early adopters in Cuba in early 2015, as we enter a time of potential change. Specifically, we explore Cubans' access limitations and the activities they do online, as well as what Internet access means to them. We conducted interviews with 12 Cuban Internet users and observed their social media use. Our findings suggest that access limitations and slow network speeds greatly restrict Cubans' Internet use. To counter these limitations, Cubans are collaborative, often conducting online research and posting photos for friends with less access. Based on these findings, we propose future work to help meet Cuban citizens' information needs.

From amateur creativity to social media status updates, nearly every Internet user is also a content creator-but who owns that content? Policy, including intellectual property rights, is a necessary but often invisible part of online content sharing and social computing environments. We analyzed the copyright licenses contained in the Terms of Service of 30 different websites where users contribute content, then conducted a survey to match perceptions of copyright terms to the reality. We found that licensing terms vary in unpredictable ways, and that user expectations and opinions differ by license and by type of website. Moreover, the most undesirable terms, such as right to modify, appear more frequently than users expect. We argue that users care about how their content can be used yet lack critical information. Site designers should take user needs and community norms into account in creating and explaining copyright policies.

Large classes, both online and residential, typically demand many graders for evaluating students' written work. Some classes attempt to use autograding or peer grading, but these both present challenges to assigning grades at for-credit institutions, such as the difficulty of autograding to evaluate free-response answers and the lack of expert oversight in peer grading. In a large, online class at Georgia Tech in Summer 2015, we experimented with a new approach to grading: framing graders as meta-reviewers, charged with evaluating the original work in the context of peer reviews. To evaluate this approach, we conducted a pair of controlled experiments and a handful of qualitative analyses. We found that having access to peer reviews improves the perceived quality of feedback provided by graders without decreasing the graders' efficiency and with only a small influence on the grades assigned.

Copyright law is increasingly relevant to everyday interactions online, from social media status updates to artists showcasing their work. This is especially true in creative spaces where rules about reuse and remix are notoriously gray. Based on a content analysis of public forum postings in eight different online communities featuring different media types (music, video, art, and writing), we found that copyright is a frequent topic of conversation and that much of this discourse stems from problems that copyright causes for creative activities. We identify the major types of problems encountered, including chilling effects that negatively impact technology use. We find that many challenges can be explained by lack of knowledge about legal or policy rules, including breakdowns in user expectations for the sites they use. We argue that lack of clarity is a pervasive usability problem that should be considered more carefully in the design of user-generated content platforms.

If you could accomplish a complex, collaborative work task with one tool or many tools working together, which would you choose? In this paper, we present a case study of GISHWHES (the "Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen"), an annual event in which teams spend one week completing complex, creative tasks. Building on the literature of IT ecosystems, we show how teams used different collections of tools to meet their communication needs. We interviewed team members, finding that most teams used multiple tools during GISHWHES. By analyzing which tools they chose over others for each function, we gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, and the complexity surrounding work processes. In light of this complexity, this research highlights the importance of designing appropriable tools that can work with unanticipated workflows and mesh well with other tools in a communicative ecology.

The Something Awful Forums (SAF) is an online community comprised of a loosely connected federation of forums, united in a distinctive brand of humor with a focus on the quality of member contributions. In this case study we find that the site has sustained success while deviating from common conventions and norms of online communities. Humor and the quality of content contributed by SAF members foster practices that seem counterintuitive to the development of a stable and thriving community. In this case study we show how design decisions are contextual and inter-dependent and together these heuristics create a different kind of online third place that challenges common practices.

How do online content creators make decisions about copyright law? In the course of day-to-day online activities, Internet users are forced to make subtle judgments about one of the most confusing and nuanced areas of law, copyright and fair use. In this study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with eleven content creators who participate in remix and fan creation activities online, to try to probe their legal understandings and attitudes. We found that social norms that emerge among these content creators do not always track to what the law actually says, but are often guided more by ethical concerns. Our participants showed surprisingly similar patterns of understandings and confusions, impacting technology use and interaction online.

Once referred to by the Supreme Court as the "metaphysics" of law, many parts of copyright policy are historically confusing. Therefore, it isn't surprising that in communities where amateur content creators work within a legal gray area, copyright is a frequent topic of conversation. Here, people with often little knowledge of the letter of the law are asking and answering complex legal questions in the context of their creative activities. Working from a content analysis of public forum conversations in eight different online communities, we have examined these questions and answers more closely. By studying these interactions, what can we learn about how people engage with the law and how non-expert advice affects behavior and knowledge?

CSCW systems are playing an increasing role in activism. How can new communications technologies support social movements? The possibilities are intriguing, but as yet not fully understood. One key technique traditionally leveraged by social movements is storytelling. In this paper, we examine the use of collective storytelling online in the context of a social movement organization called Hollaback, an organization working to stop street harassment. Can sharing a story of experienced harassment really make a difference to an individual or a community? Using Emancipatory Action Research and qualitative methods, we interviewed people who contributed stories of harassment online. We found that sharing stories shifted participants' cognitive and emotional orientation towards their experience. The theory of "framing" from social movement research explains the surprising power of this experience for Hollaback participants. We contribute a way of looking at activism online using social movement theory. Our work illustrates that technology can help crowd-sourced framing processes that have traditionally been done by social movement organizations.

In this paper, we integrate theories of distributed leadership and distributed cognition to account for the roles of people and technology in online leadership. When leadership is distributed effectively, the result can be success stories like Wikipedia and Linux. However, finding a successful distribution is challenging. In the online community Newgrounds, hundreds of collaborative animation projects called "collabs" are started each year, but less than 20% are completed. We suggest that many collabs fail because leaders are overburdened and lack adequate technological support. We introduce Pipeline, a collaboration tool designed to support and transform leadership, with the goal of easing the burden on leaders of online creative projects. Through a case study of a six-week, 30-artist collaboration called Holiday Flood, we show how Pipeline supported redistributed leadership. We conclude with implications for theory and the design of social computing systems.

We report on the implementation and evaluation of a three-year program to increase interest in studying computer science (CS) among African American male high school students. Over the course of 3 years, the Glitch Game Tester (Glitch) program employed 25 African American male high school students. These students tested pre-release digital games, full-time in the summer and part-time in the school year, with an hour of each day dedicated to learning introductory CS. Initially, only 20% of our participants expressed interest in pursing computing as a career. After Glitch, 65% have pursued some form of post-secondary computing studies. These outcomes, and the participants' enthusiasm for engaging in computing, are in sharp contrast to the crisis in African American male education and learning motivation. The research presented in this report discusses lessons learned through implementation of the Glitch program and higher education outcomes after graduation from the program.

Minorities are the fastest growing demographic in the U.S. and the poverty level in the U.S. is the highest it has been in 50 years. We interviewed middle to upper class, suburban, white American parents and low-income, urban, African-American parents to understand how each group incorporates technology into their lives. Participants had teens in their homes and devices like computers and cell phones played a powerful and preeminent role in family life. Our results show that socioeconomic differences both reflect and reinforce technology use at home. Specifically, low socioeconomic status families share devices more often and low socioeconomic status teens have more responsibility and independence in their technology use. We argue that that as low socioeconomic status families become the majority demographic, the CHI community needs to better understand how to design for these groups.

We report on a study of the English edition of Wikipedia in which we used a mixed methods approach to understand how nested organizational structures called WikiProjects support collaboration. We first conducted two rounds of interviews with a total of 20 Wikipedians to understand how WikiProjects function and what it's like to participate in them from the perspective of Wikipedia editors. We then used a quantitative approach to further explore interpretations that arose from the qualitative data. Our analysis of these data together demonstrates how WikiProjects not only help Wikipedians coordinate tasks and produce articles, but also support community members and small groups of editors in important ways such as: providing a place to find collaborators, socialize and network; protecting editors' work; and structuring opportunities to contribute.

With the growing body of qualitative research on HCI and social computing, it is natural that researchers may choose to conduct that research in a mediated fashion - over telephone or computer networks. In this paper we compare three different qualitative data collection technologies: phone, instant message (IM), and email. We use quantitative analysis techniques to examine the differences between the methods specifically concerning word count and qualitative codes. We find that there are differences between the methods, and that each technology has affordances that impact the data. Although phone interviews contain four times as many words on average as email and IM, we were surprised to discover that there is no significant difference in number of unique qualitative codes expressed between phone and IM.

We present the results of an interview study investigating student experiences in two online introductory computer science courses. Our theoretical approach is situated at the intersection of two research traditions: distance and adult education research , which tends to be sociologically oriented, and computer science education research , which has strong connections with pedagogy and psychology. The article reviews contributions from both traditions on student failure in the context of higher education, distance and online education as well as introductory computer science. Our research relies on a combination of the two perspectives, which provides useful results for the field of computer science education in general, as well as its online or distance versions. The interviewed students exhibited great diversity in both socio-demographic and educational background. We identified no profiles that predicted student success or failure. At the same time, we found that expectations about programming resulted in challenges of time-management and communication. The time requirements of programming assignments were unpredictable, often disproportionate to expectations, and clashed with the external commitments of adult professionals. Too little communication was available to access adequate instructor help. On the basis of these findings, we suggest instructional design solutions for adult professionals studying introductory computer science education.

Many young African American males have a passion for video games, but they don't often translate that passion into learning about computing. Part of the problem is that they do not identify with computing as a social norm within their peer group. This disidentification with computing can negatively impact academic performance and limit opportunities for upward mobility. We developed a job training program called Glitch Game Testers in which young African American men are trained to 'Sbreak open the black box' of their game consoles to learn about computing. Perceptions of peers' technical competency were measured before and after the summer 2010 program. Results showed that participants were more likely to view their peers as technical resources and their overall access to technical resources increased. Broader implications for motivating technology adoption in HCI are discussed.

With millions of teenagers on the Internet, millions of parents are trying to understand what their teens are doing and why. Understanding how technology use impacts teens' learning, growth, and social development is critical for their health and wellbeing and for the welfare of the family. Yet, balancing parent authority with teen privacy and autonomy is difficult. We conducted an interview study with 16 parents to examine challenges in "technoparenting" - parenting teens' technology use. Parents said they wanted more transparency in their teens' use of cell phones and the Internet and they struggled with their own unfamiliarity with technology. Technoparenting is a distributed problem and, surprisingly, parents wanted support and collaboration from the broader community. We conclude with design implications for a socially translucent "digital window".

Physical violence against women is pervasive through out the world and domestic violence has been a longstanding issue in feminist activism and research. Yet, these experiences are often not represented in technological research or design. In the move to consider HCI at the margins, in this paper, we ask: how have ICTs affected the experiences of domestic violence survivors? We interviewed female survivors living in a domestic violence shelter about their experiences with technology. Participants reported that they were harassed with mobile phones, experienced additional harassment (but also support) via social networking sites, and tried to resist using their knowledge of security and privacy.

In this paper we present a study with young African American men, to gain a better understanding of the impacts of cultural and gender identity on play practices and to explore the relationship between cultural play practices and interest in computing. Our findings indicate that while young African American men play video games frequently, their objectives in playing may be unlike those who enter computer scientist fields. From this we discuss implications of this study on designing CS learning interventions that leverage video games to introduce young people to computation.

Online creative collaboration (peer production) has enabled the creation of Wikipedia and open source software (OSS), and is rapidly expanding to encompass new domains, such as video, music, and animation. But what are the underlying principles allowing online creative collaboration to succeed, and how well do they transfer from one domain to another? In this paper, we address these questions by comparing and contrasting online, collaborative animated movies, called collabs, with OSS projects. First, we use qualitative methods to solicit potential success factors from collab participants. Then, we test these predictions by quantitatively analyzing a data set of nearly 900 collabs. Finally, we compare and contrast our results with the literature on OSS development and propose broader theoretical implications. Our findings offer a starting point for a systematic research agenda seeking to unlock the potential of online creative collaboration.

Online creative collaboration projects are started every day, but many fail to produce new artifacts of value. In this poster, we address the question of why some of these projects succeed and others fail. Our quantitative analysis of 892 online collaborative animation projects, or "collabs," indicates that the early presence of organizational and structural elements, particularly those of a technical nature, can predict successful completion.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between digital games and interest in computer science. When we undertook this research, our goal was to expand upon past work that explores video games as a positive influence on students' interest in CS. We utilized both quantitative and qualitative research methods with a large technically and academically competent subject pool. We hypothesized that subjects with more years and intensity of playing video games would have a stronger interest in computer science. While we did find a small relationship, the proportion of the total responses accounted for by the relationship is only 8%. This suggests that while gaming may be correlated to an interest in CS, it is a small correlation and other variables must be considered more influential.

A growing number of corporations have created sites where customers talk to one another. What kind of interaction takes place on these sites? In this study, we interviewed eleven members of company online communities (COC). We found that while users initially come to such sites looking for product information, they often stay to socialize, and develop meaningful friendships with other members (even turning to one-another for support in times of personal tragedy). We present case studies of interaction on two sites for Campbell's Soup, and for MINI Cooper car owners. We found that users are drawn to these sites because the product's brand image attracts a group of like-minded individuals. Adjectives used to describe the brand are also used to describe site members. I.e., Campbell's is trusting and down-to earth; MINI is fun-loving. Implications for website design are discussed.

Computing education suffers from low enrollment and a lack of diversity. Both of these problems require changes across the entire computing education pipeline. The "Georgia Computes!" alliance, funded by the National Science Foundation's Broadening Participation in Computing program, seeks to improve the computing education pipeline in Georgia. "Georgia Computes!" is having a measurable effect at each stage of the pipeline, but has not yet shown an impact across the whole pipeline.

Leadership plays a central role in the success of many forms of online creative collaboration, yet little is known about the challenges leaders must manage. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study of leadership in three online communities whose members collaborate over the Internet to create computer-animated movies called "collabs." Our results indicate that most collabs fail. Collab leaders face two major challenges. First, leaders must design collabora-tive projects. Second, leaders must manage artists during the collab production process. We contrast these challenges with the available empirical research on leadership in open-source software and Wikipedia, identifying four themes: originality, completion, subjectivity, and ownership. We conclude with broader implications for online creative col-laboration in its many forms.

We describe the implementation of a six-week course to teach Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to high school students. Our goal was to explore the potential of HCI in motivating students to pursue future studies in related computing fields. Participants in our course learned to make connections between the types of technology they use in their daily lives and the design processes that went into creating these technologies. We suggest that by portraying computing through the lens of HCI, as an innovative, creative, and challenging field with authentic, real-world applications, we may be able to motivate students to become more interested in computing.

This study examines dating strategies in Social Networking Sites (SNS) and the features that help participants achieve their dating goals. Qualitative data suggests the SNS feature, the friends list, plays a prominent role in finding potential dates, verifying credibility, and validating ongoing relationship commitment levels. Observations of how study participants use the friends list may provide design implications for social networking sites interested in facilitating romantic connection among their users. More broadly, this research shows how subtle user-interface design choices in social computing software can have a profound effect on non-trivial activities like finding a life partner.

Studies show that teenagers perceive computing to be boring, antisocial, and irrelevant to their lives. We interviewed 13 teenagers from local Atlanta schools and observed over 40 teenagers in after-school technology programs to learn more about their perceptions of computing. We then interviewed 22 graduate students in the Human-Centered Computing and Human-Computer Interaction programs at Georgia Tech in order to learn about the factors that motivated them to pursue degrees in computing. We found that teenagers perceived computing to be boring, solitary, and lacking real-world context, yet graduate students described their research as exciting, social, and having a direct and meaningful impact on the world around them. Our results suggest that there is an opportunity to increase interest in computing among teenagers by bridging the gap between their perceptions of computing and the actual opportunities that are offered in computing disciplines. In this paper, we first describe our interview results. We then discuss our findings and propose a design-based curriculum to teach teenagers core computing principles. The goal of this curriculum is to prepare and motivate them for careers in today's expanding, Internet-based, global economy. We suggest that by portraying computing as an innovative, creative, and challenging field with authentic, real-world applications, we may be able to motivate teenagers to become more excited to pursue careers in computing.

Traditional activities change in surprising ways when computer-mediated communication becomes a component of the activity system. In this descriptive study, we leverage two perspectives on social activity to understand the experiences of individuals who became active collaborators in Wikipedia, a prolific, cooperatively-authored online encyclopedia. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a lens for understanding participation in a community as an adaptable process that evolves over time. We use ideas from activity theory as a framework to describe our results. Finally, we describe how activity on the Wikipedia stands in striking contrast to traditional publishing and suggests a new paradigm for collaborative systems.

As a more diverse population of users moves online, understanding how to help those groups work together and leverage their diverse skills poses a significant challenge for human-computer interaction. This paper presents a case study of the design of an online community that supports kids interviewing elders to build up a shared database of oral history. Two pilot studies with existing technology are presented, and a software design based on those studies is described, along with future work. This work shows the value of prototyping with existing technology in order to uncover user needs in an onine environment.

No abstract available.

Should programming languages use natural-language-like syntax? Under what circumstances? What sorts of errors do novice programmers make? Does using a natural- language-like programming language lead to user errors? In this study, we read the entire online interactions of sixteen children who issued a total of 35,047 commands on MOOSE Crossing, an educational MUD for children, We counted and categorized the errors made. A total d 2,970 errors were observed. We define natural-language errors as those errors in which the user failed to distinguish between English and code, issuing an incorrect command that was more English-like than the correct one. A total of 314 natural-language errors were observed. In most of those errors, the child was able to correct the problem either easily (41.1% of the time) or with some effort (20.7%). Natural-language errors were divided into five categories. In order from most to least frequent, they are: syntax errors, guessing a command name by supplying an arbitrary English word, literal interpretation of metaphor, assuming the system is keeping more state information than is actually the case, and errors of operator precedence and combination. We believe that these error rates are within acceptable limits, and conclude that leveraging users natural-language knowledge is for many applications an effective strategy for designing end-user-programming languages.

No abstract available.