Negotiating Voice and Privacy: Doctoral Students’ Perspectives on Participatory Information Systems

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a Value-Sensitive Design study to develop a participatory information system that supports student progress through a PhD program. We engaged over thirty PhD students and alumni over three iterative design phases comprising semi-structured interviews and participatory design workshops. The study elicited categories for collecting and sharing crowdsourced information and labels for privacy levels. Findings show that the collected information was valuable, particularly critical for new students' decision-making, and provided insights otherwise unavailable. Additional findings revealed privacy concerns over information sharing, how different privacy labels might affect voicing versus silence, as well as the credibility of participatory systems. Privacy concerns emerged to be significantly different among domestic (US) versus international students, which informed our user personas generation. We conclude by providing design recommendations for online systems in higher education that support student voicing.