Awards
The iConference Awards recognize the most exceptional research papers and posters presented at the iConference each year. They are judged by the respective track chairs.
Best Full Research Paper Award
Winner and Finalists
Click on the arrows to see all finalists in order of IDs.
(157) Voices from the River: Exploring Digitally Inclusive Tools with Marginalised Fishing Communities in Bangladesh.
Md Khalid Hossain, Gillian Christina Oliver, Misita Anwar, Tanjila Kanij, and Manika Saha
Monash University/ Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Introduction. This study investigates how small-scale fishing communities in Bangladesh, often excluded from digital initiatives, articulate their priorities for inclusive tools. Using digital inclusion and intersectionality frameworks, it examines how gender, age, and livelihood contexts shape digital aspirations.
Method. Sixteen participatory ideation workshops were conducted in two districts with 128 participants stratified by age and gender (elderly men, elderly women, young men, young women). Sessions involved community mapping, problem identification, persona-building, and co-design of digital futures. Data were transcribed, translated, and thematically analysed, guided by Jia et al.’s five-dimensional digital inclusion model.
Analysis. Thematic coding and intersectional comparison revealed both shared priorities and subgroup-specific visions. Findings were aligned with digital inclusion and participatory design literature to identify theoretical and practical implications.
Results. Across all groups, participants emphasised accessible tools for livelihoods, regulation, and service access. Gendered differences emerged, with men prioritising occupational and market-based tools, and women focusing on caregiving, health, and small-scale entrepreneurship. Generational divides also shaped digital imaginaries, with older participants seeking stability and safety, while youth highlighted skills, autonomy, and transformation.
Conclusion. Digital inclusion is a situated, intersectional process requiring participatory, context-sensitive approaches. The study underscores the need to recognise intra-community diversity when designing equitable digital futures.
Best Full Research Paper Award
Winner and Finalists
Click on the arrows to see all finalists in order of IDs.
(157) Voices from the River: Exploring Digitally Inclusive Tools with Marginalised Fishing Communities in Bangladesh.
Md Khalid Hossain, Gillian Christina Oliver, Misita Anwar, Tanjila Kanij, and Manika Saha
Monash University/ Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Introduction. This study investigates how small-scale fishing communities in Bangladesh, often excluded from digital initiatives, articulate their priorities for inclusive tools. Using digital inclusion and intersectionality frameworks, it examines how gender, age, and livelihood contexts shape digital aspirations.
Method. Sixteen participatory ideation workshops were conducted in two districts with 128 participants stratified by age and gender (elderly men, elderly women, young men, young women). Sessions involved community mapping, problem identification, persona-building, and co-design of digital futures. Data were transcribed, translated, and thematically analysed, guided by Jia et al.’s five-dimensional digital inclusion model.
Analysis. Thematic coding and intersectional comparison revealed both shared priorities and subgroup-specific visions. Findings were aligned with digital inclusion and participatory design literature to identify theoretical and practical implications.
Results. Across all groups, participants emphasised accessible tools for livelihoods, regulation, and service access. Gendered differences emerged, with men prioritising occupational and market-based tools, and women focusing on caregiving, health, and small-scale entrepreneurship. Generational divides also shaped digital imaginaries, with older participants seeking stability and safety, while youth highlighted skills, autonomy, and transformation.
Conclusion. Digital inclusion is a situated, intersectional process requiring participatory, context-sensitive approaches. The study underscores the need to recognise intra-community diversity when designing equitable digital futures.
Award for Best Short Research Paper
Winner and Finalists
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(118) Engineering Oral Stories: A Conceptual Model of Traditions as Water
Andrew Wiebe
University of Toronto, Canada
Introduction. Oral narratives often change form and ownership as they transition from speech to text, yet cataloguing practices rarely capture this fluidity. This study examines how description can mirror the layered nature of stories, rather than freezing them at the moment of initial recording.
Method. A comparative case design is used. First, recensions of the Táin Bó Cúailnge are examined through de Laet and Mol’s (2000) “fluid‑technology” lens to model how narrative parts are exchanged like pump components. Second, Mapping Assiniboia Residential School Survivor Stories: Did You See Us? is presented to demonstrate an Indigenous perspective in contemporary North America.
Analysis. The analysis of these two case studies is a literary review that provides a theoretical framing of scholarly responses to FRBR, addressing and situating how different oral traditions align in a central ambiguity.
Results . In both cases, a recurring chain appeared: community blueprint, local knowledge carriers, and distribution principles. Conventional catalogues only document the carrier, leaving the blueprint and flow unseen. A three-tier FRBR-Lite model captures all layers without the data overhead that hinders full FRBR adoption.
Conclusions. Treating description as hydraulic stewardship—tracking blueprint, pump, and flow—aligns metadata with long-standing narrative fluidity and honours Indigenous sovereignty by incorporating community protocols at the carrier level.
Award for Best Poster
Winner and Finalists
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(486) Privacy Concerns and ChatGPT:
Exploring Online Discourse through the Lens of Information Practice on Reddit
S M Mehedi Zaman, Saubhagya Joshi, Yiyi Wu
Rutgers University, United States of America
Introduction. As millions of people use ChatGPT for tasks such as education, writing assistance, and health advice, concerns have grown about how personal prompts and data are stored and used. This study explores how Reddit users collectively negotiate and respond to these privacy concerns.
Method. Posts were collected from three major subreddits — r/Chatgpt, r/privacy, and r/OpenAI — between November 2022 and May 2025. An iterative keyword search followed by manual screening resulted in a final dataset of 426 posts and 1,900 comments.
Analysis. Using information practice as the theoretical lens, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis to identify collective practices of risk negotiation, validated with BERTopic topic modeling to ensure thematic saturation.
Results. Findings revealed risk signaling, norm-setting, and resignation as dominant discourses, and collective troubleshooting and advocacy for privacy-preserving alternatives as key adaptive practices.
Conclusion(s). Reddit functions as a site of collective sense-making where users surface risks, establish informal norms, and share strategies for mitigating privacy threats, offering insights for AI design and privacy literacy initiatives.
Award for Best Chinese Research Paper
Winner and Finalists
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(817) 智慧医疗场景中老年人健康信息的隐私风险识别及应对研究/Identifying and Mitigating Privacy Risks to Older Adults’ Health Information in Smart Healthcare Settings
Shanman Li, Leye Yao, Xin Jiang
Sichuan University, China
[目的/意义]识别智慧医疗场景中老年人健康信息的隐私风险，有助于回应老龄社会背景下的信息权益保护需求。[方法/过程]结合既有研究中的伦理基础与智慧医疗场景中的老年人健康信息活动，提出其隐私风险的识别分析框架。通过对多元利益相关者的深度访谈与平台隐私政策文本的收集获取资料，借助扎根理论方法对资料文本进行编码分析，以此构建智慧医疗场景中老年人健康信息的隐私风险诱发模型（IP-PR模型）。[结果/结论]基于模型阐释，研究识别出自主授权失效、隐私权利让渡、信息代理偏差、信息用途失控与价值判断操控五类典型隐私风险，指出主体信息素养、平台制度环境、平台技术环境与社会文化环境是上述风险的主要诱因，并基于此提出了针对性应对策略。
[Purpose/Significance] Identifying privacy risks to older adults’ health information in smart healthcare settings helps meet rights-protection needs in aging societies.
[Methods/Process] Building on ethics-oriented scholarship and the lifecycle of health-information activities in smart healthcare, we propose a risk-identification framework. We then collect data through in-depth interviews with multiple stakeholders and a corpus of platform privacy policies and apply grounded-theory coding to construct an Inducer–Pathway–Privacy Risk (IP–PR) model of risk emergence.
[Findings/Conclusions] The model reveals five typical risk types—failure of autonomous authorization, privacy-rights transfer, proxy-operation bias, uncontrolled information use, and value-judgment manipulation—and shows that four classes of inducers (individual information literacy, the platform’s institutional environment, the platform’s technical environment, and the socio-cultural environment) differentially trigger or amplify these risks. Based on these findings, we propose targeted mitigation strategies.