We examine a leaderless social movement characterized by participants' autonomy and the absence of leaders and organizations. We conducted a participant observation study of the Anti-ELAB movement in Hong Kong. Focusing on the organization of a protest march, we collected thousands of lines of discourse in the LIHKG Forum and the Telegram instant messaging system. Our grounded theory analysis revealed hundreds of groups acting within a symbiotic network. Participants promoted an ethos of empowering individual participants and groups to act autonomously. At the same time, participants' extensive use of hyperlinks and polls orchestrated a coherent social movement. We discuss how this novel formation can mediate successful leaderless movements.

Invisible work is an important CSCW research agenda, and also integral to operations within companies. To reveal these hidden practices, studies to date have suggested that companies use IT systems to share location, task progress, and enquiry information among employees, or to conduct research work which identifies informal practices. In this paper, we examine a work review system, in the form of a smartphone app feature, to identify hidden employees' contributions. This Complimenting Feature, developed in April 2017 by an air cargo handling company in Hong Kong, allows its terminal staff to compliment other employees-anyone they like, and anytime they like. In December 2017, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 terminal staff regarding their experiences using the app. Our analysis of the interviews found a wide range of invisible work being identified despite the existence of a similar paper review form. We have also found evidence of increased employees' motivation and social learning.

Despite spending significant amounts of time on the Internet, today's young adults often do not use online information effectively to support their creative pursuits--an activity we refer to as creative information use. In this exploratory study, we interviewed 19 media art college students in Hong Kong to understand their creative information use and to identify the challenges they faced in engaging with creative information online. The interviews reveal that young adults lacked sufficient media literacy to negotiate information online. More importantly, our study suggests that parents, teachers, and peers often failed to collectively sustain young adults' media-related interests and creativity development. We discuss research gaps in HCI and the design of technologies, and raise important issues of creative information use for future studies.

While studies of social movements have mostly examined prevalent public discourses, undercurrents' the backstage practices consisting of meaning-making processes, narratives, and situated work-have received less attention. Through a qualitative interview study with sixteen participants, we examine the role of social media in supporting the undercurrents of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Interviews focused on an intense period of the movement exemplified by sit-in activities inspired by Occupy Wall Street in the USA. Whereas the use of Facebook for public discourse was similar to what has been reported in other studies, we found that an ecology of social media tools such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Docs mediated undercurrents that served to ground the public discourse of the movement. We discuss how the undercurrents sustained and developed public discourses in concrete ways.

User appropriation can be immensely helpful to bootstrap emerging technologies; but how do new and lesser known technologies attract these earliest adopters? This paper investigates user appropriation of emerging computing technologies, by focusing on Bitcoin, a digital monetary system supported by a peer-to-peer network of computing devices. We conducted in-depth interviews with sixteen Bitcoin community participants in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Baltimore. We describe user appropriation in this case of Bitcoin as a sociocultural journey-from encounter, research and learning, to socialization. We contribute the concept of cultural affinities, including conceptual, contextual and social dimensions, as important mediators leading to early-stage user appropriation.

Interest-driven Internet communities often use an assemblage of media technologies to support knowledge creation and learning. In this paper, we examine the uneven functions of these media technologies in meeting the learning needs of online game players. StarCraft is an online game and electronic sport where millions around the world compete in virtual battlegrounds. To become better players, gamers actively share strategies in online forums, wiki, videos, and in person. We conducted participant observation of a StarCraft community known as Teamliquid. We performed 24 in-depth interviews with professional gamers, editors, game commentators, and community leaders. We found that the novice learners generally learned from, and participated in, public media channels, whereas the StarCraft experts congregated in small teams in which members learn from each other within private media channels and in person. We use the concepts of informational media and socially-oriented media to describe the general learning needs supported by media technologies.

Intergenerational players are online game players of different generations within an extended family. We investigated intergenerational play between older parents and their adult children in the popular Chinese social networking game QQ Farm. We identified game features that encourage intergenerational play. To do this, we conducted online observations and semi-structured interviews with nine pairs of Chinese parents and their adult children. The results of this study suggest that an online game for intergenerational play needs to consider a range of factors, including social and occupational responsibilities, gaming interests, and gaming expertise among extended family members. The data suggests that intergenerational online games may generally benefit from the following features: (1) low entry barrier, (2) appealing game theme, (3) online interactions that extend real-life relationships, (4) low time commitment, and (5) asynchronous play. We have also found features which may have unique appeal to Chinese intergenerational gamers.

The term community does not have an exact equivalent in Chinese. Therefore, we may ask: To what extent do standard premises of online community research apply in China? In our ethnographic studies of two Chinese websites, we found that small "core teams" organized and managed work, and were sustained by offline and behind the scenes interactions. We urge that research on online communities examine preconceptions that may overlook important realities, and that we be mindful that small close-knit groups may be relevant, in the original spirit of studies of cooperative work.