Making Space for Support: An Exploratory Analysis of Pandemic-Response Mutual Aid Platforms
Open accessAbstract
The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of unprecedented hardship across the United States. In response, local community members leveraged mutual aid as a form of citizen-based, peer-to-peer care. In this paper, we are interested in teasing out significant design features that support the facilitation of mutual aid on online platforms. To this end, we conducted a scenario-based claims analysis of the two most widely used platforms for mutual aid, based on three primary user groups. Our analysis suggests that design for mutual aid platforms considers features which support request standardization and balanced visibility alongside validation and conversational interaction.
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Prior HCI scholarship has largely examined mutual aid in contexts of crisis informatics, focusing on assembled networks that respond to disruptions.
“Prior HCI scholarship has largely examined mutual aid in contexts of crisis informatics, focusing on assembled networks that respond to disruptions [16, 26, 43, 46, 53, 67].”
From Infrastructuring as Collective Resistance: How Disabled Students Negotiate Access Through Technology in Universities (2026) · cites this paper as [26]
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Nguyen, T., Kaviani, D., & Salehi, N. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3706598.3714192 · Cited by 13 · see citing works
Kim Ly, C., Cross, T., Tasman, S., Mattka, J., Doggett, O., Marathe, M., & Chandra, P. (2026) · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3772318.3791638
“Prior HCI scholarship has largely examined mutual aid in contexts of crisis informatics, focusing on assembled networks that respond to disruptions [16, 26, 43, 46, 53, 67].”
- Authors
- Knearem, T., Jo, J., Tsai, C.-H., & Carroll, J. M.
- Affiliations
- Pennsylvania State University (US)
- Venue
- C&T '21: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Wicked Problems in the Age of Tech
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2021-06-20
- Pages
- 38-43
- OpenAlex
- W3176703918
- Cited by
- 18
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 2.92
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Locations
- International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T) (publishedVersion)
- DigitalCommons@UNO (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Disaster Management and Resilience
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Keywords
- mutual aid, COVID-19 pandemic, digital platforms, platform design, visibility, validation, conversation, user groups
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