Differential Benefits: The Impact of Computer Clubs in Palestine on Volunteers CSCW012

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Abstract
This paper presents a longitudinal case study of two volunteer-led computer clubs in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank. Combining participatory action research, autoethnography, and follow-up interviews conducted ten years later, we examine how socio-technical infrastructures of learning were built and sustained under intertwined constraints. While the clubs were designed to support children’s engagement with technology, the most meaningful outcomes were reported by the volunteers, whose roles required navigating logistical, interpersonal, and political challenges in resource-constrained settings. Our findings position volunteers as infrastructural actors: they stitched together tools, partnerships, and routines to stabilize the clubs and create a durable social infrastructure. We identify the breadth of work and social structures implicated in volunteering and show how technology mediates these interdependencies. Recognition and care practices (such as debriefs, reflection rituals, acknowledgments) emerge as design requirements for sustaining participation, reflecting a shift from questions of access to recognition observed in feminist hackerspaces. Gendered trajectories reveal how women volunteers negotiated leadership and gained professional capital in male‑dominated contexts. Our longitudinal findings provide an empirical account of an uneven temporality of impact: durable benefits accrue to those performing infrastructural labor (volunteers), whereas short‑term beneficiaries (child participants) recall little after a decade.

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