Value considerations in an information ecology: Printed materials, service providers and homeless young people
Jill Palzkill Woelfer, Megan Wei‐Man Yeung, Candice Gail Erdmann, David G. Hendry · Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2008
We demonstrate how value considerations can be used to analyze an information ecology that has emerged to help homeless young people.We studied the information ecology of service agencies that assist homeless young people, age 13 to 25.We focused on printed materials used at the agencies and employed surveys and semi-structured interviews to gather data.Of the printed materials considered, a flier with a map of all programs was reported to be most important and distributed most frequently.Future work would further investigate distribution and usability of these portable information sources and the values they embody.We begin this short paper, which provides a proposal for a poster presentation, by introducing the information ecology of the Homeless Youth Alliance (HYA) and the value sensitive design research approach.Then, we present initial results.Lastly, we discuss how these results could lead to improvements in HYA's information ecology. The Information Ecology of HYAAccording to Nardi and O'Day (1999), an information ecology is "a system of people, practices, values and technologies in a particular local environment" (p.49).The HYA, a pseudonym for the collaborating organization in this work, consists of nine interconnected service agencies that strive to improve the lives of homeless young people age 13 to 25.These agencies provide a range of services for young people including shelter, food, drop-in programs (e.g., using hygiene resources, congregating for recreational activities, and so on), healthcare, counseling, case management, educational assistance, and arts programs.Eight of the nine service agencies are located within an eight-block area (walking distance).The locations and hours of operation of the agencies, which are staffed with a few paid staff and many volunteers, vary from day to day, partly because of limited space availability at churches, clubs and other hosting organizations.Recognizing the autonomy of the service agencies, lack of top-down control, and notably the importance of agency-specific leadership, we decided to represent this system with the information ecology metaphor.Each agency promotes the services of the others by providing brochures, maps and other printed materials that are displayed at each service location (Figure 1, 2 and 3).Thus, homeless young people can become familiar with all the alliance's full range of services by accessing individual agencies.How homeless people move through the network of services is unknown, but the availability of the printed materials and oral communication between the homeless young people, staff, and volunteers is undoubtedly crucial.So, the printed materials and the interactions surrounding them provided the focus for our research.