Sharing Food, Gathering Information: The Context and Visibility of Community Information Work in a Crisis Event

This paper describes ICT use after a disaster, connecting the stories of various community responders and tracing their activities across sociotechnical networks. Drawing on contextual interviews and the digital record, we reveal how information work, food work, and emotional labor intersected. At the most superficial level, we find that many community responders continue to rely upon face-to-face communication and “real simple” technologies to coordinate their activities. This research also speaks to the visibility of community response work—offering a method for surfacing less visible work given the social complexities of a disaster. This approach provides a complementary perspective to research that relies solely on digital traces.