Jean Hardy

The mass protests that followed the 2020 presidential election in Belarus unfolded alongside extensive use of digital infrastructures under conditions of authoritarian repression. In particular, the moment saw a political activation of Belarus’s IT sector that had not been seen before. This paper explores how IT professionals contributed to protest and civil resistance through digital expertise, and how their roles evolved in response to changing sociopolitical conditions. Drawing on in-depth interviews with IT professionals involved in these efforts, we examine how participants mobilized technical expertise to build tools such as election verification systems and secure communication channels, and how they came to take on additional roles in knowledge brokerage and risk management. As the regime’s countermeasures evolved, so did IT expertise, moving from tool development to knowledge brokering and digital literacy promotion. Rather than viewing expertise as a static resource, our findings reveal it as dynamic and evolving, shaping how participants understood and enacted their own roles under conditions of repression. By documenting this evolution, we bridge previously disconnected research streams in CSCW, offering insights into how expertise functions in digitally-mediated protest movements.

Recent geographic shifts in high-tech labor markets have redirected attention toward economic growth in small cities and rural regions across the United States. We examine how this shift has spurred economic development organizations, think tanks, and rural municipalities to leverage digital data in local economies as a strategic tool for attracting investment. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on rural development policy and practice, we turn to the design of a new type of development tool: the digital asset map. In this paper, we describe how nationwide mapping and data visualization initiatives push for the digitization of rural community-based asset data, from broadband infrastructure to breweries. While these systems are intended to promote sustainable rural development, and to help leaders in their efforts to repopulate and revitalize rural communities in decline, their design often encourages comparison across communities in ways that reify divides between the rural “haves” and “have-nots”. By privileging quantifiable data, digital asset maps risk marginalizing communities whose strengths are less easily captured in datasets, potentially reinforcing existing patterns of uneven rural development.

Through design workshops and ethnographic fieldwork, this manuscript explores how students in hybrid alternative high-schools navigate their conflicting desires for nurturing educational environments and efficient certification. We highlight two competing visions in students’ designs of future educational technologies: one of affirmative and supportive spaces that address student mental health, sense of community, and identity needs; another that prioritizes expediency through self-paced, on-demand learning. We make three key contributions: 1) documenting how students struggle to navigate competing educational purposes; 2) analyzing how current hybrid school structures meet and conflict with student desires; 3) demonstrating how design ideas originating from students embody these tensions, sometimes offering paths forward for creative reconciliation. We argue that hybrid schools represent a critical site for understanding the future of educational technology, and advocate for designing digital tools and platforms that balance care and efficiency while supporting diverse student needs in increasingly digitized educational landscapes.

This paper examines how rural communities in the United States are made and make themselves legible to opportunities in the high-tech economy. Drawing on the concept of economic legibility, I develop a case study based on 2 years of ethnographic research on the high-tech economy in a remote region of the rural Midwest. Through ethnographic evidence, this paper argues that legibility does not reside within a passive set of assets but is actively formed in an ongoing relational process developed by internal and external actors across multiple scales. Rural communities cultivate legibility both through utilizing existing assets (e.g., digital infrastructure, higher education partnerships, and local leadership) and through working towards developing needed assets (e.g., entrepreneurial culture, tech workforce, investment capital) to become viable participants in the high-tech economy. By examining how legibility can be understood as co-constituted rather than imposed from outside, this paper challenges traditional power dynamics in development frameworks and offers implications for how information and communication technology for development research can better examine the relationship between rural communities and high-tech economic opportunities. The findings provide a nuanced understanding of how rural places negotiate their participation in contemporary economic development, balancing regional identity preservation with technological transformation while maintaining agency in determining which aspects of the high-tech economy best serve their development goals.

Existing research and practice related to digital agriculture technology adoption is largely focused on large-scale producers. In this paper, we describe a case of adopting an advanced soil monitoring system in a community-based agricultural organization. We provide guidance for Extension professionals seeking to implement or promote digital agriculture technology adoption on: selecting appropriate technology, incorporating new technology into existing practices, harnessing local technology champions, and avoiding data-driven mission creep.

Within CSCW, there is a robust body of literature examining the infrastructures, institutions, and labor processes enabling pervasive processes of datafication. Key public sectors and industries are being increasingly datafied, often in the service of implementing AI tools to improve the efficiency, efficacy, and equity of public goods and services. This panel specifically examines the role of CSCW scholars in advancing public-interest technologies by engaging with datafication through the register of data governance. Each panelist brings perspectives from diverse domains of datafication - including healthcare, education, and agriculture - and state, corporate, and community forms of data governance. We invite panelists and attendees to explore a series of provocations focused on reconceptualizing our role and responsibility as researchers in intervening in processes of datafication and data governance.

For young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, and those belonging to other marginalized sexual and gender identities (LGBTQ+), accessing information to develop one's identity and community is essential. Yet information and resource access is a particularly complex process for LGBTQ+ youth living in rural areas and small towns without dense, visible LGBTQ+ networks. While efforts to remove LGBTQ+ resources and demonize LGBTQ+ people intensify, this study asks a group of young LGBTQ+ adults living in and around a college town in the rural Midwestern United States to document their experiences with navigating information landscapes in low-resource settings. Despite the remarkable everyday creativity required to craft their information practices, participants' current efforts produce several vulnerabilities that make local queer information networks precarious and often inaccessible. We lay out several patterns in this data, including experiences of both connectedness and disconnectedness, the role of organizations in information sharing, and the existence of both active and passive information search. Building on prior research that found increasing demand for multi-modal access to relevant information that is digitally enabled, but deeply embedded in localized social geography and LGBTQ+ community, we use this data and complementary interviews to identify problem areas and potential interventions to strengthen rural LGBTQ+ young people's information access. In response to the informational needs and desires of LGBTQ+ youth in this community, we propose a series of imaginative designs. These speculative artifacts are embedded in local communities to strengthen grassroots webs of knowledge. We focus on contributing solutions that fall under three problem areas in participants' information ecosystem: increasing information stumbling, building expert capacity and support, and bridging the disconnected to the connected. We propose speculative conceptual designs that address core challenges in LGBTQ+ information networks, working in the tradition of ''information activism'' to create and maintain access to otherwise precarious and ephemeral resources and spark social change.