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CHI '26 · Honorable mention · full-paper review · confidence medium-high

CaseCompass: Designing Sustainable, Community-Led Socio-Technical Systems for Gender-Based Violence Support Work

Nimra Ahmed , Sargam Telang , Larissa Senning , Thu An Phan , Tim Portmann , Sandra Rosch , Angelika Strohmayer , Elaine M. Huang

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This is a compelling CHI paper because it treats the software artifact and the collaboration around it as inseparable. Its strongest move is to argue that in GBV support work, a good system must preserve narrative and relational practice while also being handover-ready, locally maintainable, and accountable to the organization after research ends.

Axes Lens

Rare contribution shape, typical evidence profile. The point here is not a score. It is to show what kind of claim the paper makes, and whether the evidence pattern is unusual or baseline in this 268 -review set.

Review Summary

CaseCompass is most convincing when read not as a paper about a clever case-management interface alone, but as a paper about what responsible socio-technical system design looks like in a high-stakes, under-resourced care setting. The authors clearly identify a familiar failure mode in existing case management systems: they privilege rigid structure, bureaucratic legibility, and administrative order over the narrative, temporal, and emotionally charged realities of frontline support work. Rather than merely criticizing that mismatch, the paper shows how those concerns shaped the design of a concrete system with flexible documentation, tagging, search, and in-house configurability. Just as importantly, it argues that these design choices only make sense when paired with a community-led process, phased rollout, manuals, internal champions, and a handover plan. That is where the paper’s real CHI value lies. It turns sustainability from an afterthought into a first-class design concern and frames abandonment as a care and justice failure, not just a deployment inconvenience. The evidence is appropriately bounded: the evaluation is preliminary, small-scale, and qualitative, and the authors are transparent about not measuring efficiency or long-term performance. That honesty strengthens the paper because it keeps the claims proportional to the evidence. The main limitation is also the paper’s main boundary: this work depends heavily on embeddedness, trust, and a specific organizational context, so it should not be read as a universally transferable recipe. Even so, it offers a strong methodological and normative contribution to CHI by showing how artifact design, participation structure, and infrastructural responsibility can be integrated into one coherent account of community-led system building.

What Changed

Canon before

Prior HCI and social-service research on case management systems typically treats the main problem as one of information structure, accountability, workflow support, or usability. That literature often documents rigid forms, fragmented records, and workaround practices, but many systems are still framed as tools for standardization and administrative coordination. Work with NGOs and third-sector organizations also frequently warns about extractive collaboration and abandoned systems after research ends, yet many papers still separate the artifact from the longer-term infrastructural relationship needed to sustain it. Against that backdrop, this paper enters an existing conversation about participatory design, care, and social-service infrastructures, but pushes those concerns into a concrete GBV support setting where narrative continuity, organizational autonomy, and post-project survival are central rather than secondary.

Departure from common sense

The paper pushes back on the common assumption that better case management means more rigid structure, more standardized fields, and tighter administrative control. Instead, it argues that frontline GBV support work depends on preserving narrative flow, relational context, and time-sensitive documentation during emotionally charged interactions. It also rejects the idea that a successful research contribution is simply a deployed tool or prototype. The authors treat sustainability, handover, and organizational independence as part of the design problem itself, arguing that a system that cannot be maintained locally or that redistributes burden back onto staff is not truly successful. This reframes both what a case management system should optimize for and what counts as a meaningful CHI contribution in a high-stakes care context.

Actual novelty

The paper’s novelty lies less in introducing an unprecedented software feature set and more in presenting CaseCompass as a community-led infrastructuring project for a small NGO working on forced marriage support. The contribution combines a concrete digital case management system with a sustained account of how participation was structured under severe time, safety, and capacity constraints. The authors use the artifact’s creation and deployment to argue that sustainability should be understood as care and justice, not merely maintenance. That makes the paper novel as a situated socio-technical contribution: it links flexible narrative documentation, in-house configurability, phased deployment, manuals, and handover planning into a broader argument about organizational independence. In CHI terms, the originality is in the integration of artifact, process, and normative framing rather than in a standalone technical breakthrough.

Evidence

The paper grounds its claims across multiple parts of the full text rather than relying on the abstract alone. The introduction establishes the departure from rigid, structure-first case management by explicitly stating that existing systems fail to support narrative, relational, and time-sensitive frontline support. The contribution claim is reinforced in the introduction through the statement that the tool’s creation is used as a lens for studying participation under severe constraints and infrastructural care. Validation evidence comes from the evaluation section, which clearly defines the study as a preliminary deployment focused on early usability, fit, and workflow integration rather than efficiency or long-term performance. Limitation evidence is supported in the discussion, where the authors state that without embeddedness collaborations can remain transactional and fragile. Taken together, the evidence supports a strong qualitative reading of the paper as a bounded but well-grounded field deployment and design case study.

Limits

Method limits

The paper is careful about scope, but its empirical support remains limited to a preliminary, small-scale deployment and qualitative feedback. The evaluation involved only two advisors in the real-world diary phase, and the authors explicitly note that they did not log configuration actions or track measurable performance changes because of sensitivity and the early stage of deployment. That means the paper cannot support strong claims about efficiency gains, long-term adoption patterns, or comparative superiority over other systems. It is persuasive as a situated design case and as an argument about infrastructural care, but not as causal evidence that the system broadly improves outcomes across organizations or contexts.

Deployment limits

Deployment is tightly bound to a specific NGO, a Swiss forced-marriage support context, and a six-year trust-based collaboration. The system design, rollout strategy, and handover model all depend on organizational rhythms, local priorities, and the presence of internal champions who can absorb administrative and maintenance responsibilities. Other organizations may not have the same staffing stability, embedded researcher relationship, or capacity to sustain manuals, training, and in-house technical contacts. As a result, transfer is plausible at the level of principles, but not guaranteed at the level of direct replication.

Boundary conditions

The paper’s claims hold most clearly in settings where support work is emotionally intensive, narrative-heavy, and constrained by limited time and resources. The approach assumes that preserving conversational flow matters more than maximizing standardized data entry, that organizations need some degree of local configurability, and that long-term trust and relational accountability can be built into the collaboration. It is less obviously applicable to highly bureaucratized environments that require strict standardization, to organizations without capacity for phased rollout and handover, or to contexts where embedded collaboration is impossible. The contribution therefore generalizes best as a model for care-centered socio-technical design in resource-constrained support organizations, not as a universal template for all case management systems.

Manual check: Evidence coverage has been repaired by spreading support across introduction, evaluation, and discussion material rather than concentrating all claims in one location. Offsets and section ids are retained only where grounded in the provided focused sections. Manual review can focus on editorial preference and final offset verification policy, not on missing claim types.

Position in field

This paper sits squarely within feminist, social justice-oriented, and care-centered HCI, while also contributing to research on third-sector organizations and social-service infrastructures. Its importance is not that it advances a new algorithmic technique, but that it demonstrates how a CHI contribution can be built around community-led infrastructuring, organizational autonomy, and the ethics of sustainment. It extends prior critiques of rigid case management systems and extractive NGO collaborations by showing how those critiques can be operationalized in a concrete design and deployment project. The paper also participates in a broader field-level debate about what counts as novelty and rigor in CHI: here, the value comes from a situated artifact plus a carefully argued account of participation, handover, and sustainability as justice. That makes it a strong example of how socio-technical systems research can foreground care, maintenance, and post-project responsibility without abandoning concrete system building.

Abstract

Third sector organizations that address gender-based violence often rely on makeshift tools to manage complex, emotionally intensive casework. Although digital systems promise structure, most fail to support the narrative, relational, and time-sensitive nature of frontline support. This paper presents the design, development, and deployment of CaseCompass, a digital case management system co-created with the Competence Center against Forced Marriages, a national NGO in Switzerland. The project emerged from a long-term, trust-based collaboration and foregrounded organizational priorities, care practices, and long-term sustainability. Rather than treating the tool as the endpoint, we use its creation as a lens to examine how participation can be structured under severe time and capacity constraints, and how design decisions can serve as infrastructural care. We contribute to feminist and social justice-oriented HCI by offering a detailed case study of community-led infrastructuring within a small NGO, articulating strategies for structuring participation under constraints, and framing sustainability as an active practice of care, responsibility, and justice.