While the term global development suggests development efforts spanning the entire globe, in practice, such projects are predominantly associated with the Global South. As a result, development initiatives have been criticized for reinforcing paternalistic and colonial narratives of progress, deepening the divide between the "developed" West and the "less developed" rest. Similarly, HCI4D research is largely focused on the Global South, often overlooking the challenges faced by marginalized communities in high-income countries. In this paper, we examine an underexplored context for HCI4D: culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities in Australia. Drawing on interviews with 10 non-profit practitioners experienced in working with CALD communities, we report on key challenges encountered in Development work. Our findings highlight the need to (i) secure genuinely informed consent, (ii) recognize the mediating role of local volunteers, and (iii) address cross-cultural communication gaps to support authentic community representation. While grounded in a specific setting, our insights offer broader implications for both HCI4D and the wider HCI community.

This is a corrigendum for the article "Bridging the Technical Gap: A Unified Representation Framework for Voice-based Community Engagement Platforms" published in Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, 7, Article CSCW277 (November 2025), 39 pages.

Suicidal ideation and behaviours are common among adolescents. Parents play a fundamental protective role in the prevention of adolescent suicide, but many describe feeling ill-equipped in their caretaking role. This is despite prior research indicating that it is important for these parents to feel empowered to emotionally support their adolescent if they are experiencing suicidality. An online parenting program could offer parents flexible access to evidence-based parenting strategies. However, there are limited digital resources for these parents and, further, very little is known about how an intervention could be designed to support the empowerment of these parents. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to explore how an existing evidence-based, digital parenting intervention, Partners in Parenting (PiP+), could be adapted through co-design to empower parents. Four parents who have lived experience of caring for a suicidal adolescent, four young people who experienced suicidality during adolescence, and four experts in youth mental health/suicide prevention participated in four sets of co-design workshops to innovate adaptations to PiP+ to empower parents of suicidal adolescents. Affinity mapping was used to analyse and interpret findings. Three key themes highlight how a digital intervention could be innovated and adapted to empower parents caring for a suicidal adolescent. Specifically, for parents to feel empowered to parent a suicidal adolescent, a digital intervention should support them to (1) “deal with the now”; (2) “acknowledge needs and understand their role”, and (3) “hold hope for the future”. Further, ten sub-themes were developed illustrating different concepts related to these themes. Findings highlight how technological features could support parents to feel more empowered when caring for a suicidal adolescent. In conclusion, the proposed technological features illustrate how digital interventions can be adapted to empower parents in their role of emotionally supporting and managing the suicide risk of their adolescent.

BACKGROUND:There is a need for developmentally tailored intervention approaches that empower parents to respond to adolescent school refusal in the context of internalising disorders. Partners in Parenting Plus-Education (PiP-Ed+) is a manualised coach-assisted online parenting programme that has been co-designed with parents, youth and education-sector experts to fill this gap. It addresses multiple parenting factors associated with adolescent school refusal and internalising disorders. AIMS:This study aimed to evaluate the acceptability, feasibility and preliminary indications of efficacy of PiP-Ed+. METHOD:An open-label, uncontrolled trial was conducted using a mixed-methods design. Participants were 14 Australian parents of adolescents (12-18 years) who had refused school in the context of internalising disorders. RESULTS:PiP-Ed+ was viewed as highly acceptable and feasible. Coaching sessions in particular were perceived as valuable and appropriate to the parents' level of need, although longer-term support was suggested to sustain progress. Between baseline and post-intervention, there were significant increases in parents' self-efficacy to respond to adolescent school refusal and internalising problems, and concordance with evidence-based parenting strategies to reduce adolescent anxiety and depression. Days of school refused and carer burden did not change. CONCLUSIONS:Findings support the value of proceeding to evaluate the efficacy of PiP-Ed+ in a randomised-controlled trial. Results are interpreted in the context of study limitations.

During crisis situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, nonprofit organizations must rapidly adapt their community engagement approaches, yet traditional co-design methods often fall short in such time-sensitive, multi-stakeholder contexts. This paper examines how design methods need to evolve when working with nonprofits during crises by analyzing our intensive six-month collaboration with five Australian nonprofits serving migrant youth communities. Through Action Research involving over 130 co-design sessions, workshops, and stakeholder meetings, we developed and iteratively refined a social media engagement playbook. Our findings reveal three key methodological innovations: (1) adapting co-design methods for crisis contexts through flexible, asynchronous engagement; (2) managing multiple stakeholder relationships through what we term “nonprofit ecologies”—understanding organizations’ overlapping roles and relationships—and (3) balancing immediate needs with long-term goals through infrastructuring approaches that build sustainable capacity. This research contributes practical methods for conducting collaborative design during crises while advancing a theoretical understanding of how traditional design approaches must adapt to support nonprofits in complex, time-sensitive situations.

HCI practitioners in development contexts utilize collaborative digital technologies for community engagement in international development, often mediated through platforms like social media, tele-conferencing, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR). However, the lack of standardized representation approaches for these platforms impedes effective communication among stakeholders. We propose a unified graphical framework for characterizing and representing collaborative platforms, focusing on audio/voice-based engagements. Our framework segments community engagement sessions into engagement formats, characterizing them with preconditions, configurations, and outputs, and visualizes them using state machine-based representations. A field study demonstrates the framework's effectiveness in supporting stakeholder communication for real-life scenarios. We contribute to CSCW literature by providing a standardized approach that offers a common framework/language for discussing, developing, or reconfiguring collaborative platforms. Our findings show that this framework enables non-governmental organizations and researchers to navigate under-explored design spaces, enhancing the utilization of voice-based platforms for engaging distributed marginalized communities.

Communication between government agencies and not-for-profits (NFPs) within the local funding sector typically require the writing and submitting of long-form text-based reports. These processes are time and resource intensive and require skill in written communication, placing a significant administrative burden on the small, already under-resourced organisations who interact with programs. NFP’s now have the technical literacy to create rich video content, but little is understood about how video could be used instead of, or alongside traditional written reports. We present findings from a novel funding acquittal (final report) process that we designed for a government grant programme to explore the affordances of video from the perspective of the grantee. We discuss the affordances of structured short-form video to overcome the barriers faced by organisations during these reporting processes. We present design considerations for digitally mediated processes that could support the media augmentation of these established workflows.

Driven by pragmatic, cost-related, and environmental factors, voice-based remote community engagement tools (such as Interactive Voice Response) are emerging as a key modality for engaging marginalized communities. These voice-based digital solutions offer new opportunities for distributed community engagement and empowerment, and the ability to capture, store, and access a wide range of different records (i.e., recordings, interactions and contextual metadata) associated with community engagements. This potential for large scale, distributed community record collection necessitates an understanding of inclusive and effective recordkeeping approaches for appraisal, documentation, preservation, and accessibility of different types of records (such as audio recordings, transcripts, reports, and observatory notes) related to voice-based community engagements. Through qualitative analysis of stakeholder focus group discussions with domestic workers (as marginalized community members) and NGOs working in the sector, we present valuable insights and recommendations for the development of recordkeeping approaches tailored to voice-based remote community engagement records.

Multiple HCI projects have demonstrated the potential of digitally-enhanced, synchronous telephony platforms for use with and by resource-limited communities. However, these platforms were each designed to only facilitate a single archetype of community engagement, limiting their capacity for adaptation when contextual or stakeholder requirements change. This paper builds upon these projects to introduce a design vocabulary, grounded in a formal ontology describing the core components necessary to run adaptable, structured engagements through synchronous group telephony. Through a series of scenarios, we present how this design vocabulary can be used to: help design and communicate different models of synchronous audio engagements, describe existing technologies, and highlight other novel ways in which such platforms could be used. We discuss how while under-explored to this point, synchronous telephony platforms can be designed to orchestrate stakeholder engagements with a degree of flexibility previously impossible in remote, offline contexts.

Although listening to community voice is a core value in HCI4D, we have limited methods to capture the community voice of marginalized groups within disadvantaged communities. Working with NGOs and 24 marginalized women farmers in Bangladesh, we promoted psychological safety and empowerment through our configuration of the process. Our stakeholders decided to record and produce a radio-style audio recording that presented their counter-collective narratives for development projects. We reflect on this process using the Benefits of Community Voice framework to document rich insights into community contexts, lived experiences, local knowledge, and building trust and buy-in and through interviews with three NGO workers. We discuss the fundamental need of stakeholders for a safe place to share, the value of letting stakeholders guide method selection, the significance of counter-collective narratives, the benefits of participatory audio to hear community voices for democratizing and sustaining development and design implications of our work for HCI4D.

While online parenting interventions have been shown to improve youth mental health, parents find it challenging to engage with and implement strategies from self-directed interventions. Our study purposefully designed a parent peer-support community for parents seeking support. Our two-phased qualitative study included parent interviews and design workshops. Our findings show that while parents need others’ lived experiences to learn about parenting, perceived judgment and self-doubt can stop them from actively contributing to the peer support group. To address this design challenge, we operationalised parents’ needs and challenges gained in the interviews and workshops into design implications. We demonstrate a parent-centered design approach where we formulate design implications that integrate parents’ needs and expectations with multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical evidence to deepen and concretise the design for an online parent peer-support community that cultivates empathy, encourages confidence and self-efficacy, and motivates change and growth.

Recent work in HCI has explored the use of ICTs for the mobilisation and organisation of values-led communities and social movements. This paper extends this line of work by exploring the design of a communication system for informal, place-based citizen collectives-also referred to as Social Solidarity Movements. The distinctive characteristics of such collectives, namely their decentralised, bottom-up and self-organised organisation, and their lack of monetary resources, pose interesting challenges for communication technology design. The work reported in this paper sought to explore how the values and practices of such collectives can be embodied in mobile communication tools. A system was designed to mirror on-the-ground informal organisational structures, its primary goal being to serve as a probe for research and discussion. Our findings highlight the diversity of channels and organisational structures prevailing in these contexts, their participatory nature, and issues of temporality, anonymity, privacy, and trust, all of which must be considered when designing technologies to support cooperative work. We contribute methodological insights and design implications for mobile technologies underpinning the work of social collectives and their practices.

University students are well known for volunteering within non-governmental organisations (NGOs). A significant part of NGO practice is the production of documents that communicate their work to local communities and international stakeholders. However, organisations often struggle to resource translations of these documents, resulting in the exclusion of the very same communities that they want to reach. Although many students are multilingual and are willing to volunteer their time and language skills, there are few structured opportunities configured for such non-professional translation of content in the short-term mode that would fit into the student pattern of availability. We developed Action Translate to specifically support these motivated, non-professional translators within the volunteering constraints of university life. Action Translate leverages machine translation post-editing to support teams of volunteers working on NGO translation projects online. Through analysis of a real-world deployment, we discuss how digital systems can be developed to better support student volunteer translators, specifically in building collegiate interaction and identity as translators for a cause.

Community voice is widely used in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human-computer interaction (HCI) work with underserved communities. However, the term is unresolved, denoting disparate activities, methods, and phenomena that are at their most useful when combined. We argue for a rethink by setting out a more nuanced understanding of "community" and "voice". Building on our own experiences of HCI for development (HCI4D) work and the existing literature, we propose a framework for the benefits it can bring to those who actively engage with communities as part of their work. This framework can be understood in terms of its four constituent benefits for CSCW and HCI4D practitioners: (i) understanding context, (ii) creating empathy, (iii) leveraging local skills and knowledge, and (iv) building trust and buy-in. We reflect on how an improved understanding of these benefits applies to three prior projects with women living in Bangladesh and discuss the issues and need for more work on community voice. Finally, we discuss how this more detailed perspective on community voice helps us understand power dynamics and polyvocal communities in development contexts.

School refusal is a complex issue which typically develops in adolescence, often in the context of anxiety and depressive disorders. While parents and educators play a critical role in supporting these adolescents, they need guidance to work together to overcome the problem. Our study explores how technology can be designed to help parents and educators work together in supporting adolescents who refuse school. We first conducted 14 interviews with parents which highlighted that empathic understanding and communication between parents and the educators is key to supporting adolescents with school refusal. Subsequently, we conducted co-design workshops with three parents, three adolescents and five educators. Our workshop findings show that reactive and problem-focused communication can undermine trust-building and progress towards supporting the adolescent. Drawing on these findings, we formulate design implications that can enable empathic parent-adolescent-educator partnerships, provide holistic support for parents, and facilitate individual tailoring for diverse parent-adolescent journeys.

International program development is a complex process involving many stakeholders. Current international practice affords limited, if any, opportunities for direct community-led input into the program commissioning process, resulting in programs that may not meet the specific needs of communities on the ground. Community voice is one source of data that could help focus the design of effective development programs and interventions. However, development programs are primarily formulated based on representative and often quantitative data conducted by experts from outside the community. Through a participatory video production process with disadvantaged women farmers in rural Bangladesh, we explore the opportunities for including meaningful community voices in these institutionalized processes. We present practical design implications for how community-generated voices can act as rich data, establishing confidence, community bonds and senses of accountability to inform early stages of project development, and to specifically augment and contextualize other data sources.

The rich detail generated by qualitative research is essential for understanding workplace contexts and processes for organizational development. This can be a highly involved and extensive process, thus limiting the number of people who can normally be allowed to fully participate. This is especially problematic when it comes to workplace collaboration and development, as it means that a large number of voices are not considered and heard. In this paper, we provide and implement a novel semi-automated approach that enables large-scale qualitative research. This was done within the context of developing a new organizational strategy for a large and diverse multi-lingual international development organization. We included over 150 different stakeholders whilst enabling their views to be collected and analyzed in depth. This case study demonstrates how to effectively implement qualitative interview research at scale with an application to the employee voice setting, contributing the tools and means to achieve this.

While information and communication technology for development (ICTD) researchers have prioritized advocating for community voices in innovation design and development, we have limited insights into how community voices are incorporated by the high-level decision-makers who fund and initiate development projects and programs in the Global South. Indeed, understanding local communities’ voices (expressions of needs, challenges, and priorities) in tailoring effective development projects for sustainable development is widely considered an unmet goal. Using a qualitative survey of eight decision-makers (including grantmaking donors, central governments and INGOs) we explored a number of key factors, including national and global political climates, insider-outsider interactions, and evidence-based approaches that influence the high-level decision making process, workflows, and perceptions of community voice in project commissioning within Bangladesh’s public health nutrition development arena. Our findings reveal the tensions that arise among high-level decision-makers, and highlight the challenges associated with connecting with communities during development project design and implementation. We suggest broader implications and design opportunities for inventive project commissioning approaches to bridge the gap between communities and decision-makers. Our findings are of potential value for ICTD and HCI4D researchers interested in sustainable innovation and understanding and participating in the complex workflows of the project commissioning process in sustainable global development.

Telephone-driven community forums have been a widely proposed solution to address the unreliable internet connectivity and large geographic scope that characterizes many international NGO contexts. Primarily, these applications support asynchronous activities, such as information portals or forums to access rural journalism, but opportunities for real-time experience sharing remain largely under-explored. In this paper, we explore the potential of such forums to support remote mentoring of NGO volunteers, a practice that requires synchronous, dialogical formats for experience sharing and peer discussion. We engaged 28 participants from a rural Indian NGO in the design of peer-mentoring sessions that leverage synchronous audio discussions, using the structure and format of traditional talk-show radio as a starting point. The participants favored an entertaining approach to mentoring and discussed the logistics required to achieve this within their resource constraints. We conclude with design implications for designing media-driven community engagement platforms and the ethical challenges around protecting marginalized community interests.

Historically, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) researchers in the Global South have advocated for a community-based approach to technology design and development. However, even with this "bottom-up" emphasis, the sustainability and scalability of the resulting innovations remain major challenges, and are poorly understood. To address this gap, we take the case of Bangladesh as a typical Global South context in which development work is carried out by a complex intertwined network of stakeholders across governments, NGOs, donors, and industries. To better understand the current development landscape and its priorities for digital technologies, we conducted interviews with 14 influential decision-makers in Bangladesh who play significant roles in the development of nutrition strategies. Our findings highlight a disconnect between the Bangladesh government's "digital mandate" and the reality of digital innovation practice within the nutrition development sector. Our paper contributes to the debate on factors that affect decision-making processes. We explore the dynamics of diverse actors and institutions who are intended to participate in, but can act as obstacles to sustained bottom-up innovations. Our findings expand understanding of institutional priorities, the dynamics of intermediaries, techno-solutionism, postcolonialism, bureaucracy, competition, and other important topics in CSCW scholarship. We suggest understanding the factors that guide the decision-making process of digital innovation practices in terms of four dimensions: internal, external, vertical, and horizontal. Consequently, we recommend CSCW and HCI researchers become mediators to connect decision-makers and communities and bring their voices in ICT innovations for global development. Finally, we offer recommendations for proactive engagement with decision-making stakeholders, enabling researchers to design community-centered sustainable digital innovations for development.