Community Informatics

Designing for Upstream Work: Learnings from Co-Design for Preventative Solutions with Urban Fire Departments

Public health and social welfare fields increasingly recognize the need for preventative interventions that address root causes rather than respond to emergent problems – yet face significant challenges in designing tools and demonstrating success for such initiatives. We characterize these important, but difficult to develop and scale solutions using Dan Heath’s term “upstream work”. We then explore design solutions to support upstream work through a multi-phase co-design process to assist fire departments developing alternate EMS response programs to reduce 911 call volume.

Care Workers' Risk Work: How Nannies Manage Invisible Threats in Employers' Homes

Extending prior HCI and CSCW research on invisible challenges that domestic care workers face, we examine how childcare workers, particularly nannies, experience and manage workplace risks. Drawing on interviews with 21 full-time nannies, we identified three interrelated risks—physical, emotional, and financial—arising from structural and relational constraints in employers’ homes. Through the lens of risk work, we show how these multi-dimensional constraints create tensions that hinder nannies' direct risk mitigation strategies.

Local News at a Distance: Psychological Distance and the Formation of News Deserts

News deserts, geographical areas with little or no local news due to a lack of resources or news organizations, pose challenges to civic engagement and democratic life (Abernathy, 2023). Local news not only documents events but also shapes public perception of space and place in particular times by connecting geographic locations through stories. This paper proposes a framework linking news deserts to psychological distance using Construal-Level Theory (CLT) (Trope & Liberman, 2010).

Predicting the Success of Local Gatherings: A Comparison of Organizer- and Participant-side Success in Meetup

This study examines the dynamics of local community gatherings facilitated by EventBased Social Networking platforms, a growing mode of social interaction in urban settings. While these platforms are increasingly used to organize real-world events, limited research has explored the factors that shape the success of these events across diverse city environments and how local socio-spatial contexts influence participation and engagement.

Spatial Dynamics of Local News: Mapping City Co-Mentions in Alabama

This study investigates how the relationships between cities are represented in local news by analyzing co-mentions of cities in 31,004 news articles from Alabama. Using a large language model, we extract geographic references and construct co-mention networks that reflect both spatial proximity and symbolic connections. To interpret these links, we develop a classification framework of relationships between cities, including common impacts and sequential dynamics. Our preliminary analysis reveals that different news categories produce distinct patterns of spatial association.

Quantifying Urban Change across U.S. Cities using the 1930s Redlining Maps: A Preliminary Study

A wide range of studies has explored historical events and their long-term impacts, with urban redevelopment, particularly in the contexts of urban renewal, gentrification, and redlining, emerging as a rich area of research. However, despite extensive attention to its causes and consequences, quantifying how urban structures have changed over time remains methodologically challenging, as scanned historical maps contain visual noise and annotation.

Mapping Risk Work and Designing Technologies to Support it in CSCW Research

This workshop brings together CSCW scholars of various domains, such as medicine and healthcare, disaster planning, and public safety, to consider different dimensions of risk work and their implications on computing. Risk work encompasses the practices through which workers assess, manage, and mitigate potential harms in situations framed by uncertainty. In the face of a pervasive rhetoric of crisis, risk work is expanding and evolving as workers and laypeople are increasingly charged with preventing, predicting, and communicating risks.

From Open‑Ended Text to Taxonomy: An LLM‑based Framework for Information Sources for Disability Services

People with disabilities (PWD) and their family members often find it difficult to find information about available services. One of the approaches to address this information access problem is by understanding the ecology of available information sources. However, identifying the landscape of information sources is challenging due to the variety of sources and their varying visibility. This study proposes a computational approach to processing open-ended survey answers by constructing a hierarchical taxonomy of information sources.

News Deserts as Information Problems: A Case Study of Local News Coverage in Alabama

This paper explores the phenomenon of news deserts as information problems to navigate research opportunities and theorize its dynamics. Drawing on the theory of local information landscapes, news deserts are conceptualized as more than merely an absence of news organizations or content; rather, emphasizing the structural and material dimensions of local news ecosystems, such as fragmentation, transience, and inconsistent distribution. We argue that news deserts should be understood as material pre-conditions of people’s access, interpretation, and engagement with information.

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