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This paper presents an unexpected story about the outcomes of a civic project. CSCW and HCI scholarship has argued for a long-term perspective to assess civic projects and to understand how local communities appropriate - or maybe disregard - the material outcomes of these types of interventions. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how to interpret the outcomes of such projects and how to make sense of their social impact on the wider contexts they are bound to. This article draws on the notion of "political ecologies of participation" to illustrate: i) how outcomes of socially engaged projects circulate through communities and can be appropriated independently of the research inquiries they stem from; and ii) how, through such processes, impact is reconfigured as issues are added to shared concerns. The paper sets out by analyzing the entanglement of actors, meanings (e.g., values, narratives, opinions) and forms of participation that were configured throughout the transformation observed. Attention is then drawn to their political qualities, including their inherent openness and their capacity to produce change locally. The paper introduces four analytical sensitivities illustrating how thinking with political ecologies of participation can help CSCW research focus on the longer processes whereby impact can be configured.

This paper investigates the practices of organising face-to-face events of a volunteer-run food-sharing community in Denmark. The ethnographic fieldwork draws attention to the core values underlying the ways sharing events are organised, and how - through the work of volunteers - surplus food is transformed from a commodity to a gift. The findings illustrate the community’s activist agenda of food waste reduction, along with the volunteers’ concerns and practical labour of running events and organising the flow of attendees through various queuing mechanisms. The paper contributes to the area of Food and HCI by: i) outlining the role of queuing in organising activism and ii) reflecting on the role that values, such as collective care and commons, can play in structuring queuing at face-to-face events.

This paper analyzes the self-organizing network Hoffice – a merger between the words home and office – that brings together people who wish to co-create temporary workplaces. The Hoffice concept entails a co-working methodology, and a set of practices inherent in opening up one’s home as a temporary, shared workplace, with the help of existing social media platforms, particularly Facebook. We discuss both the practices of co-creating temporary workplaces, particularly for workers who lack a stable office and orchestrate flexible work arrangements, and the values and rhetoric enshrined in Hoffice. We collected our research materials through interviews, participant observation, and workshops. Our findings draw attention to i) the practical arrangement of Hoffice events, ii) the participatory efforts to get individual work done, and 3) the co-creation of an alternative social model that encourages trust, self-actualization, and openness. To conclude, we discuss how Hoffice is already making change for its members, and how this is indicative of a politics of care. We contribute to research on computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) by highlighting grassroots efforts to create alternative ways of organizing nomadic work and navigating non-traditional employment arrangements.

This paper presents a case study of an interactiveperformance that was produced and designed to encouragecivic engagement and reflection in relation to the socialtensions in a low-income suburb, mostly inhabited bypeople with immigrant backgrounds. The technologicalsetup in the performance encouraged participation bymeans of text entries that audience members could sharewith others. The analysis draws on the corpus of interviewand observational data collected, as well as the related textmessages that were shared during the performance. Weillustrate the different levels at which citizens make senseof societal issues they are concerned about, as well as theaudience-citizens’ perception of participating in such anartistic experience

This paper describes how people make sense of and use constellations of technologies in a nomadic setting, and it illustrates how maintaining and orchestrating a variety of applications and devices becomes an essential part of nomadic practices. The data were collected over a period of 3 years at a technical university by means of two field studies. Particular attention is drawn to how the situated orchestration of devices and applications within a group’s constellation reflects university students’ concern to manage their projects at a number of locations, as well as issues of time and circulation of resources. The analysis brings into focus how constellations of technologies emerge and dissolve within collaborative ensembles that only exist for the duration of a project, and how this can cause appropriation issues within groups.

This article presents an empirical study investigating audience participation in an interactive theater performance. During the performance, audience members were enticed to act upon and contribute to the performance by sharing their opinions, emotions, values and other thoughts, by means of text messages that were integrated into the performance itself. The study aimed at understanding the main characteristics of audience participation in the interactive performance, as well as the role of communication technology as a medium enabling social participation. The results draw attention to the immediate and reflective facets of audience participation, both unfolding at two different but interrelated levels of interactions: an individual and collective one.

We draw on the concept of agency in order to understand the process of how design materials 'talk back' to designers. In so doing, we illustrate the various levels at which agency can emerge in the context of intensive short-time prototyping sessions. In HCI, it is often assumed that the designer is the agent that acts intentionally in the design process. Contrary to this, recent notions of agency provide a way of analysing the performative role of design materials as intra-actions between components within a given phenomenon, rather than as meanings merely ascribed by actions of designers. The notion of agency puts focus on the emerging properties of materials and how they actively contribute to the way that design activity unfolds. The analyses showed how interaction design is to a large extent driven by emergent characteristics of available materials. The results have implications for understanding material interactions and materiality in interaction design.

This paper illustrates how the conceptualization of Places can be used to inform the technical design of mobile learning system. We apply the concept of Place in a multi-agent framework for supporting informal city-wide mobile learning activities. By taking input from the theoretical framework for analysing collaborative learning activities, we adopt the structure and organization of multi-gent framework. The functionality and components of the system are defined in light of the theoretical work. This work bridges the gap between theory and it's application in technology for mobile learning in our project.

Motivation -- This paper explores the collaborative and spatial practices of university students engaged in project work. Regarding students as nomadic workers, we attempt to elucidate how their activities are shaped by the lack of a stable and fixed location where work can be carried out.Research approach -- The data presented in this paper were collected by means of ethnographically-informed methods.Findings/Design -- The results elucidate how students manage their collaborative activities at different locations and how they use artifacts and technology in order to do so.Research limitations/Implications -- Only Swedish students participated in the field study discussed in this paper. Cultural attributes, related to privacy for instance, might contribute to the distinction between private and public places.Originality/Value -- This work highlights the relationships between group activities and the places they are bound to, with a main focus on how these relationships are mediated by technological artifacts.Take away message -- The nomadic work described suggests that design efforts should be oriented towards an integration of different applications and/or technological devices.

This one-day workshop invites discussion on the various socio-technical processes and dynamics that characterize scale and scaling in local, community-sited initiatives. Seeking to move beyond a view of scale as mere growth in numbers and a matter of technology-mediated replication, the workshop aims at developing a nuanced vocabulary to talk about various forms of scale and practices of scaling in CSCW research. It will bring together interdisciplinary scholars, activists, practitioners and representatives of the public sector who wish to question and further develop the notion of scale generally associated with processes of upscaling. The workshop provides a forum to discuss:i) concepts, theories and empirical cases that broaden our view of what constitutes scale; andii) the implications for CSCW research in assessing the long-term impact and sustenance of socio-technical innovations. The workshop will accommodate up to twenty participants and will be run virtually.