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Software bots are used to streamline tasks in Open Source Software (OSS) projects' pull requests, saving development cost, time, and effort. However, their presence can be disruptive to the community. We identified several challenges caused by bots in pull request interactions by interviewing 21 practitioners, including project maintainers, contributors, and bot developers. In particular, our findings indicate noise as a recurrent and central problem. Noise affects both human communication and development workflow by overwhelming and distracting developers. Our main contribution is a theory of how human developers perceive annoying bot behaviors as noise on social coding platforms. This contribution may help practitioners understand the effects of adopting a bot, and researchers and tool designers may leverage our results to better support human-bot interaction on social coding platforms.

Social media companies wield power over their users through design, policy, and through their participation in public discourse. We set out to understand how companies leverage public relations to influence expectations of privacy and privacy-related norms. To interrogate the discourse productions of companies in relation to privacy, we examine the blogs associated with three major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram (both owned by Facebook Inc.), and Snapchat. We analyze privacy-related posts using critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how these powerful entities construct narratives about users and their privacy expectations. We find that each of these platforms often make use of discourse about "vulnerable" identities to invoke relations of power, while at the same time, advancing interpretations and values that favor data capitalism. Finally, we discuss how these public narratives might influence the construction of users' own interpretations of appropriate privacy norms and conceptions of self. We contend that expectations of privacy and social norms are not simply artifacts of users' own needs and desires, but co-constructions that reflect the influence of social media companies themselves.

Despite increasing awareness and research about online strategic information operations, there remain gaps in our understanding, including how information operations leverage the wider information ecosystem and take shape on and across multiple social media platforms. In this paper we use mixed methods, including digital trace ethnography, to look beyond a single social media platform to the broader information ecosystem. We aim to understand how multiple social media platforms are used, in parallel and complementary ways, to achieve the strategic goals of online information operations. We focus on a specific case study: the contested online conversation surrounding Syria Civil Defense (the White Helmets), a group of first responders that assists civilians affected by the civil war within the country. Our findings reveal a network of social media platforms from which content is produced, stored, and integrated into the Twitter conversation. We highlight specific activities that sustain the strategic narratives and attempt to influence the media agenda. And we note that underpinning these efforts is the work of resilience-building: the use of alternative (non-mainstream) platforms to counter perceived threats of 'censorship' by large, established social media platforms. We end by discussing the implications on social media platform policy.

This article studies the effects and implications of sybils (secondary accounts created by a person in an online platform) through the game World of Tanks from interdisciplinary, mixed-methods perspectives. Considering sybils allows us to access a "person based'' network, instead of an "account based" network, revealing formerly undetected patterns. We move on to behavioral differences between the "parent" (the initial account) and "child" (those created afterwards) accounts in a sybil relationship. We explore the behavioral patterns of sybils using network, chat, and gameplay data. We find that sybils represent players experimenting with new roles or features without damaging their play record. We find that there are significant behavioral differences between different sybil accounts, and we leverage them to build a machine learning classifier to differentiate sybils. This classifier is able to identify sybil accounts with over 95% accuracy for sybil/non-sybil, 61% for parent/child. This study demonstrates the underexplored but rich potential for sybils to improve research and industry practitioners' understandings of user practices and experiences.

Tech users currently have limited ability to act on concerns regarding the negative societal impacts of large tech companies. However, recent work suggests that users can exert leverage using their role in the generation of valuable data, for instance by withholding their data contributions to intelligent technologies. We propose and evaluate a new means to exert this type of leverage against tech companies: "conscious data contribution" (CDC). Users who participate in CDC exert leverage against a target tech company by contributing data to technologies operated by a competitor of that company. Using simulations, we find that CDC could be highly effective at reducing the gap in intelligent technologies performance between an incumbent and their competitors. In some cases, just 20% of users contributing data they have produced to a small competitor could help that competitor get 80% of the way towards the original company's best-case performance. We discuss the implications of CDC for policymakers, tech designers, and researchers.

Building and maintaining common ground is vital for effective collaboration in CSCW. Moreover, subtle changes in a CSCW user interface can significantly impact grounding and collaborative processes. Yet, researchers and technology designers lack tools to understand how specific user interface designs may hinder or facilitate communication grounding. In this work, we leverage the well-established theory of communication grounding to develop a visual framework, called Joint Action Storyboards (JASs), to analyze and articulate how interaction minutiae impact the costs of communication grounding. JASs can depict an integrated view of mental actions of collaborators, their physical interactions with each other and the CSCW environment, and the corresponding grounding costs incurred. We present the development of JASs and discuss its various benefits for HCI and CSCW research. Through a series of case studies, we demonstrate how JASs provide an analysis tool for researchers and technology designers and serve as a tool to articulate the impact of interaction minutiae on communication grounding.

Online feedback exchange platforms enable content creators to collect a diverse set of design feedback quickly. However, creators can experience low quality and harsh feedback when using such platforms. In this paper, we leverage the empathy of the feedback provider to address both these issues. Specifically, we tested two narrative-based empathy arousal interventions: a negative experience and a design process narrative. We also examined whether ingroup framing further enhances the effects of empathy arousal. In a 3x2 online experiment, participants (n=205) wrote feedback on a poster design after experiencing one of the intervention conditions or a control condition. Our results show both the design process narrative and ingroup framing conditions significantly increased the feedback quality and effort invested in the task. The negative experience narrative condition had similar effects and participants reported significantly increased disapproval towards harsh feedback. We discuss the implications of our results for the design of feedback exchange platforms.

Widespread conspiracy theories, like those motivating anti-vaccination attitudes or climate change denial, propel collective action and bear society-wide consequences. Yet, empirical research has largely studied conspiracy theory adoption as an individual pursuit, rather than as a socially mediated process. What makes users join communities endorsing and spreading conspiracy theories? We leverage longitudinal data from 56 conspiracy communities on Reddit to compare individual and social factors determining which users join the communities. Using a quasi-experimental approach, we first identify 30K future conspiracists-(FC) and 30K matched non-conspiracists-(NC). We then provide empirical evidence of importance of social factors across six dimensions relative to the individual factors by analyzing 6 million Reddit comments and posts. Specifically in social factors, we find that dyadic interactions with members of the conspiracy communities and marginalization outside of the conspiracy communities, are the most important social precursors to conspiracy joining-even outperforming individual factor baselines. Our results offer quantitative backing to understand social processes and echo chamber effects in conspiratorial engagement, with important implications for democratic institutions and online communities., Accepted at ACM CSCW 2020

Many non-profit peer-to-peer exchange arrangements and profit-driven, multi-sided online marketplaces leverage underutilized resources, such as tools, to optimize their use to capacity. They often rely on a digital platform in pursuit of their social aspirations and/or economic objectives. We report on a field study of a local sharing community that employs a set of stickers illustrating different household items, typically placed on community members' mailboxes, along with complementary digital tools. The stickers are used to communicate the availability of resources among neighbors to facilitate social encounters and to encourage sustainable use and re-use of shared resources. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with sixteen participants, we describe the opportunities and limitations of this approach to peer-to-peer exchange. We offer insights for designers of resource sharing communities into facilitating face-to-face encounters and the online interactions needed to support them.

In this paper, we explore input with wearables that can be attached and detached at will from any of our regular clothes. These wearables do not cause any permanent effect on our clothing and are suitable to be worn anywhere, thus making them very similar to badges we wear. To explore this idea of non-permanent badge input, we studied various methods to fasten objects to our clothing and organise them in the form of a design space. We leverage this synthesis, along with literature and existing products to present possible interaction gestures these badge-based wearables can enable.

Knowledge building is a prevalent feature in open online systems, but it is challenging to motivate participants to contribute and to maintain quality in the participants' contributions. Open online competitions, where participants compete for prizes with knowledge artifacts, offer a potential design model for online systems to incentivize community knowledge building activities. However, while there is evidence that participants contribute to public knowledge and share it during competitions, it remains unclear how and why they do so. In this study, through interviews with 14 participants in Kaggle Competitions, we investigate participants' motivation, practices, and challenges when contributing to community knowledge under a competitive structure. We find that competitive mechanisms impact expert and beginner participants very differently in their public knowledge building behaviors. Experts contribute to shared knowledge in order to compete for reputation, while they tend to form their own niches and only share knowledge artifacts that are abstract and not usable by less experienced participants. Beginners are often driven away from contributing to shared knowledge because of their vulnerable social image. We leverage Scardamalia's framework for Knowledge Building Communities to discuss the different challenges and opportunities that competitive design brings to expert and beginner participants. We offer design implications for effectively implementing competitive mechanisms that could benefit both expert and beginner participants in future knowledge building systems.

Accounts of the social experience within livestreaming channels vary widely, from the frenetic "crowdroar" offered in some channels to the close-knit, "participatory communities" within others. What kinds of livestreaming communities enable the types of meaningful conversation and connection that support relationship development, and how? In this paper, we explore how personal relationships develop within Twitch, a popular livestreaming service. Interviews with 21 pairs who met initially within Twitch channels illustrate how interactions originating in Twitch's text-based, pseudonymous chat environment can evolve into close relationships, marked by substantial trust and support. Consistent with Walther's hyperpersonal model, these environments facilitate self-disclosure and conversation by reducing physical cues and emphasizing common ground, while frequent, low-stakes interaction allow relationships to deepen over time. Our findings also highlight boundaries of the hyperpersonal model. As group size increases, participants leverage affordances for elevated visibility to spark interactions; as relationships deepen, they incorporate complementary media channels to increase intimacy. Often, relationships become so deep through purely computer-mediated channels that face-to-face meetings become yet another step in a continuum of relationship development. Findings from a survey of 1,367 members of Twitch communities demonstrate how the suitability of these spaces as venues for relational interaction decreases as communities increase in size. Together, these findings illustrate vividly how hyperpersonal interaction functions in the context of real online communities. We consider implications for the design and management of online communities, including their potential for supporting "strong bridges," relationships which combine the benefits of strong ties and network bridges.

Creative workers frequently turn to online critique communities for feedback on their work. While past research has focused primarily on how to yield better feedback from providers, less is known about the strategies feedback seekers use to engage providers and request feedback. We present two studies to explore the feedback exchange dynamics between feedback requesters and providers in the subreddit community, r/design\_critiques. In Study 1, we interviewed 12 community members and found that while creators have strategies to request feedback, they expressed uncertainty about whether and how to include details about the design context, personal background, and specific feedback needs. In Study 2, through a mixed-method analysis, we identified how specific request strategies impact the quantity and quality of community feedback, and found several key, but undervalued strategies: signaling as a novice, critiquing one's own design, and providing design variants. These strategies led to better community response, but were rarely used. We offer design implications around how to leverage these insights to improve online feedback exchange

Corporations are increasingly empowering employees to hire on-demand workers via freelance platforms. We interviewed full-time employees of a global technology company who hired freelancers as part of their job responsibilities. While there has been prior work describing freelancers' perspectives there has been little research on those that hire them, the "clients", especially in the corporate context. We found that while freelance platforms reduce many administrative burdens, there are number of conditions in which using freelance platforms in a corporate context creates high transaction costs and power asymmetries that make it difficult for clients to negotiate work rights and responsibilities. This leads corporate employee clients to feel "stuck in the middle" between their employer, the platform, and the freelancer. Ultimately, these transactions costs are a potential barrier to wider adoption. If corporations want to leverage the value of the freelance economy then better guardrails, guidelines, and perhaps even creative technology solutions will be needed.

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.

The algorithm-based management exercised by digital gig platforms contributes to information and power asymmetries that are pervasive in the gig economy. Although the design of these platforms may foster unbalanced relationships, in this paper, we outline how freelancers and clients on the gig platform Upwork can leverage a network of alliances with external digital platforms to repossess their displaced agency within the gig economy. Building on 39 interviews with Upwork freelancers and clients, we found a dynamic ecosystem of digital platforms that facilitate gig work through and around the Upwork platform. We use actor-network theory to: 1) delineate Upwork's strategy to establish a comprehensive and isolated platform within the gig economy, 2) track human and nonhuman alliances that run counter to Upwork's system design and control mechanisms, and 3) capture the existence of a larger ecosystem of external digital platforms that undergird online freelancing. This work explicates the tensions that Upwork users face, and also illustrates the multiplicity of actors that create alliances to work with, through, around, and against the platform's algorithmic management.

Research in the fields of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is increasingly embracing and moving across borders. While universalism in such research is widely rejected, sole focus on the "particular'' is also commonly critiqued. Kentaro Toyama unpacks this tension, calling for balance via "deliberate efforts to understand the interplay of human universals and cultural differences, and how it pertains to design.'' In this paper, one such deliberate effort, we introduce the notion of feminist solidarity---as theorized by Chandra Mohanty---for drawing connections across borders in CSCW and HCI research, design, and practice. To enable contributions in these fields to cross cultures and geographies in productive ways, we draw attention to commonalities in the struggles and processes of resistance operating in different contexts of study. To do this, we present lessons learned from conducting three comparative studies in six contexts, which were located across various borders. The primary contribution of our analysis is to leverage a feminist solidarity-based approach towards extending conversations on comparative, transnational, and feminist CSCW and HCI research, design, and practice. Our focus remains on resource-constrained regions across the world, in both the Global North and South.

In this paper, we examine the information work that bilingual parent-education liaisons perform to create connections towards assisting immigrant parents in the United States. As part of formal and informal educational institutions, liaisons operate between different social worlds---within and beyond the domain of education---to maximize immigrant parents' engagement in their children's academic lives. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork with low-income Latino immigrants and their liaisons, we explore how liaisons leverage technology, content, and people to align these worlds; bringing them closer to mutual understanding. We borrow inspiration from the analytical lens of seams suggested by Vertesi to explore how liaisons manage the "seams'' between worlds. This analysis provides a rich and unique perspective of the work that successfully engages immigrant parents with their children's education, as well as the tensions that challenge that engagement. This understanding of the work that liaisons do with and across seams provides insights to inform design directions for technology that could facilitate and amplify their efforts. Finally, we highlight how exploring the seams that liaisons work with can inform the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) on the role of technology in mediation.

Holistic reviews are a common practice employed by universities in the USA to make admissions decisions. It is an individualized review process where reviewers assess an applicant's potential by considering various criteria including academic metrics, adversities faced, and personal attributes. While the factors considered in such reviews are broadly known, a detailed walk-through of the process is absent in existing literature. This is important to understand what is done in practice and to identify opportunities for technological interventions to support the complex and changing process. We employed cognitive task analysis and a socio-organizational approach to understand the holistic review process at a highly-selective, private university. We found the process to be nuanced and complex owing its complexity both to the numerous variables involved and the reviewers' thought processes. We present a rigorous, structured characterization of the review process and suggest possible leverage points for applying visualization decision-support tools.

We present findings from an empirical study of how groups of eight users collaborate on a decision-making task around an interactive tabletop. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine co-located collaboration in larger groups (of 8-12 users) seated around a large-scale high-resolution multi-touch horizontal display. Our findings shed light on: 1) the effect of collaboration patterns of larger groups on equity of participation; 2) the role of participants' position around the tabletop in forming collaborations; and 3) the mechanisms, which facilitate coordination and collaboration in larger group interacting around large-scale tabletops; We also contribute computational methods that leverage image processing to analyze interaction around large-scale tabletops. Finally, we discuss implications for the design of large-scale tabletop systems for supporting co-located collaboration in larger groups.