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When we conduct empirical work within CSCW research, we engage ourselves with various people, fields, domains, and topics which are part of the contexts which we study and/or are designing for. In many situations, the field, we study comprises interwoven multiplicities of technologies, artefacts, infrastructures, and people, which cannot easily be separated during fieldwork, in the analysis of the data, or in the write-up and presentation of the results. In these situations, we as researchers, produce specific engagements with our context of interests - and these engagements shape and challenge the kind of research we can do, are allowed to do, ethically can do, ethically are allowed to do, as well as what we want to do. In this panel, we will discuss what it means to do research as complex interwoven research engagements, and which methodological and ethical challenges which arises.

Our five-year ethnographic study of Palestinian tech entrepreneurship provides a unique case that examines the interplay between technology, politics and power dynamics. In this paper, we trace the formation of the Palestinian tech entrepreneurial public and analyse how it has transformed from being a counterpublic to serving as a beacon for the development of the Palestinian economy while under Israeli occupation. Despite its apparent success, the foundation of the Palestinian entrepreneurial public is fragile, as it is stuck in a repeat and rewind cycle involving the eternal application of the lean startup approach and the associated business models, which encourage the mimicking of Western design solutions. We develop the concept of a public of erosion to characterise how the Palestinian entrepreneurial public has been produced and shaped by the attrition stemming from the interlinked infrastructures created by donor agencies, powerful billionaires, the government and the Israeli occupation. A public of erosion is characterised by heavy dependencies on factors outside its immediate control, and is shaped by processes that constantly dismantle resources, leading to the wearing down of its foundation. The concept of a public of erosion is intended to provide researchers with a new language and a lens to apply when investigating digital technologies in the Global South. Finally, we demonstrate how the current structural conditions result in producing bounty hunters and real estate projects, rather than a strong digital ecosystem necessary for the development of sustainable digital technologies.

In this article, we examine the fundamental and taken-for-granted infrastructures that make tech entrepreneurship possible. We report from a longitudinal ethnographic study of tech entrepreneurs situated in occupied Palestine. By investigating this polar case of tech entrepreneurship, we identify critical infrastructures that are otherwise invisible and go unnoticed. We propose infrastructural accessibility as a method to identify available and absent infrastructures in concrete trans-local situations. Infrastructural accessibility leads us to identify multiple dimensions of critical infrastructures necessary for the success of tech startups. This includes infrastructures related to location, community, funding, digital platforms, politics, and history. Our study shows how these multiple dimensions of infrastructural accessibility shape the everyday practices of tech entrepreneurs. Furthermore, our study reveals how Palestinian tech entrepreneurship is characterized by infrastructural inaccessibility due to missing infrastructures related to mobility, legal frameworks, payment gateways, and mobile Internet. Infrastructural inaccessibility seriously limits tech entrepreneurs’ potential to succeed in creating a long-term sustainable tech industry.

This paper focuses on the collaboration in an Israeli-Palestinian tech start-up company. We investigate the strategies enacted by the IT developers for managing the political dynamics and making collaboration possible under the highly challenging political conditions. We found that one of the key strategies was explicitly separating the work domain of software development from the domain of politics. We argue that the IT developers manage to collaborate by displacing the political conflict through strategies of non-confrontation instead of engaging in translating conflicting agendas against each other. By insisting on keeping politics outside of the workspace, the IT developers adopt a strategy of keeping the collaboration together by keeping politics and work apart. However, we found that despite the attempts to manage the sub-group dynamics, politics constantly invade the workspace and challenge the collaboration. Significant resources are invested into managing the regimes of differentiated identity cards, permits, and checkpoints, all of which have consequences on the employees’ freedom or restriction of mobility. Thus, we argue that the IT development domain is inseparable from and deeply dependent upon the political domain.

This volume represents the proceedings of ECSCW 2015, the 14th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, held in Oslo, Norway, September 19–23, 2015. ECSCW 2015 received 60 paper submissions. After extensive review, 14 were selected to form the core of the traditional single-track technical programme for the conference. They are published in these proceedings from the conference. This year, exploratory papers have been introduced as a new peer-reviewed cat- egory of short papers. The exploratory papers should represent a more open and daring approach to topics and questions in CSCW and are not only short papers. In total, there were eleven exploratory papers submitted and three were accepted to the conference after extensive review. The three exploratory papers are also included in these proceedings. We gratefully acknowledge the work carried out by the exploratory papers co-chairs Kari Kuutti and Kjeld Schmidt to establish a fair review process for this new category of papers, valuing novelty, openness and a critical approach to CSCW research in Europe. We hope that the exploratory papers will spur reflection, discussion and development of our research field. The papers published in this proceeding are supplemented by workshops, mas- ter classes, posters, demos, videos and doctoral colloquium, all of which cover a broad range of topics and allow for wider and more active participation. The technical programme this year focuses on cooperative work in work set- tings as well as outside of work and on the challenges of involving citizens, patients, and others into collaborative settings. The papers embrace new theories and discuss known ones. They challenge the ways we think about and study work and contribute to the discussions of the blurring boundaries between home and work life. We have theoretical papers as well as papers offering detailed empirical studies. The papers introduce recent and emergent technologies, and stu

A much revisited question within the field of Information Systems is how research- ers can intervene in the context of large-scale, complex and heterogeneous information in- frastructures, while ensuring impact on field settings. To explore this question, I draw upon my interventions and fieldwork experiences from an action research project in a healthcare infrastructural setting. I use these experiences as a basis for appraising the normative crite- ria for rigor and relevance that are enacted in IS action research literature. I argue that while these criteria originally had important contributions, there are also weaknesses with norma- tive approaches. Specifically, these norms of action research leave relatively little space for understanding and managing emerging empirical uncertainties. These norms are important because they have implications not only on how we conduct action research in practice, but also on how we share research experiences, document and report research processes, and on how we use this literature for teaching and training purposes. Therefore, we need meth- odological perspectives more adequate to the varied experiences of empirical IS research. I propose replacing the normative frameworks found in some IS action research literature with a reflexive framework that encourages researchers to investigate critically how their methods are enacted and practiced in the field. The contribution of this paper lies in pro- viding a reflexive analysis of the situated and emergent challenges encountered when han- dling action researcher’s dual agenda of combining academic and practical contribution.