Shapeshifters in the voluntary sector: exploring the human-centered-computing challenges of nonprofit organizations

responsibilities of a chief executive officer, volunteer coordinator, program coordinator, communications director, development officer, and administrative assistant all at once. The office space she worked in was on loan from the water company in exchange for her and her volunteers providing tours of the wildlife sanctuary for local school groups. Debbie was quick to emphasize what a great arrangement this was, noting most other affiliates of their nonprofit had no office space of their own. The particular interdependency between this environmental nonprofit organization and the public utility was, in my experience, fairly unique. But interdependencies with other organizations and institutions more generally are part of the fundamental character of nonprofits and help explain the dynamic nature of much of the work they do. These interdependencies create new challenges for human-centered computing and make nonprofit organizations a particularly interesting site for research and design. There are four sectors—categories of organizations and institutions—that are often considered I’d lived in Irvine, California, for six months and never realized that there was a wildlife sanctuary there, tucked in beside the freeway and the miniature golf course, less than a mile from the university. Conducting fieldwork with more than two dozen nonprofit organizations over the past two years, I’d found myself in plenty of neighborhoods that were hidden from the public eye—a barrio with a small community health clinic situated directly beneath the flight path of an airport, or the abandoned industrial center of a state capital, now converted to a campus for the urban homeless—but I hadn’t yet found myself navigating a wildlife sanctuary hidden among the trappings of suburbia. At least it was partly a wildlife sanctuary. It was also the property of the city water company, used as part of the local water-treatment system, with just enough industrial infrastructure scattered along the roadway to leave me wondering whether I was in the right place. But I found the office I was looking for, in one of a half dozen small, out-of-place-looking cottages clustered at the end of the road. There, “Debbie” managed the local affiliate of a national environmental nonprofit. She was the only fullShapeshifters in the Voluntary Sector Exploring the Human-Centered-Computing Challenges of Nonprofit Organizations