Niloufar Salehi (UC Berkeley)

Design for Collective Action and Accountability

From Twitter hashtags such as #metoo to protests by Mechanical Turk workers in the public sphere, collectives come together online to make progress on shared issues. My research introduces social computing systems that directly center trust, familiarity, and accountability to more effectively support collective action. I will demonstrate this through three projects. The first, Hive, explores how social systems can help build strong networks by organizing a collective into small teams, then intermixing viewpoints by gradually rotating team membership. I deployed this project with Mozilla to reimagine accessible web browsing with disability advocates online. The second project, Dynamo, shows how structured human labor can help move efforts forward when they stall. I undertook this project in collaboration with worker rights advocates on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The third project focuses on accountability and studies restorative and transformative justice as underlying principles for the design of online platform moderation. This work involves participatory design with activists and practitioners of restorative justice, moderators of online communities, and survivors of online harassment and abuse to design a fictional alternative online space: The Internet’s Good Place. Through this work I envision alternate roles for social computing ecosystems in society that directly support efforts for social change.

About the Speaker

Niloufar Salehi is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information at UC, Berkeley. Her research interests are in social computing, technologically mediated collective action, digital labor, and computer supported cooperative work. Her work has been published and received awards in premier venues in human-computer interaction including CHI and CSCW. Through building computational social systems in collaboration with existing communities, controlled experiments, and ethnographic fieldwork, her research contributes the design of alternative social configurations online.