Research Report: ICT-Supported Early Warning System for Human–Lion Conflict in Botswana

This project addresses human–wildlife conflict (HWC) between rural communities and free-roaming lions in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. In this region, livestock depredation by lions represents a serious threat to local livelihoods and often leads to retaliatory killings of lions. The project was developed in collaboration with the conservation organization CLAWS Conservancy and local communities, with the goal of reducing conflict through information and communication technologies (ICT).

The core intervention is an ICT-based early warning system that alerts communities when GPS-collared lions approach grazing areas or villages. The system integrates biological data (lion movement patterns), spatial information (virtual geofences), and communication technologies to provide near–real-time warnings to farmers and herders. These alerts enable preventive measures, such as moving livestock, increasing human presence, or reinforcing enclosures, before encounters occur. The alert system has been continuously refined over time in response to empirical findings and community feedback.

Methodologically, the project follows a transdisciplinary and participatory approach. Fieldwork includes long-term collaboration with conservation practitioners and local residents, ethnographic observation, interviews, and iterative design workshops. A two-year pilot phase was launched in 2016 to evaluate the system in practice, focusing on usability, trust, local appropriation, and its effects on everyday risk management. Subsequent phases have been deployed to incrementally improve both technological and organizational components of the system.

Findings show that early warning supports changes in human practices and contributes to improved coexistence. Information sharing increased community involvement in lion monitoring and conservation, while also exposing challenges such as infrastructural limitations, uneven access to technology, and differing expectations within and across communities. The study highlights that technological effectiveness depends not only on accuracy of tracking but also on social trust, local knowledge, and institutional arrangements, including compensation schemes and conservation governance. The latest system increment includes a community-based response team that is activated in situations of elevated risk. Trained local members respond to alerts by implementing on-site conflict prevention measures, such as actively guiding lions away from settlements and grazing areas toward safer zones.

Overall, the Botswana project demonstrates how ICT-based early warning systems can help mediate human–wildlife conflict when designed as socio-technical interventions rather than purely technical solutions. The project provides empirically grounded insights into transdisciplinary design, participatory research, and the role of digital technologies in supporting coexistence between rural communities and large carnivores.

Research on the Gaza War

Contemporary warfare is increasingly shaped by digital infrastructures, data processing, and remote forms of control. In Gaza, this is visible not only in how people communicate and endure everyday life under extreme conditions, but also in how digital systems can become part of the identification, classification, and targeting of human beings. Our group examines these developments from the perspective of socio-informatics with a focus on how technologies are embedded in material constraints, social relations, and profound power asymmetries.

A central concern in our current research on Gaza is the role of technology in enabling large-scale targeting and killing. Our analysis examines how data regimes associated with commercial surveillance, including the large-scale extraction, storage, and interoperability of behavioural data, can be repurposed within military-intelligence systems. In this convergence, civilian data infrastructures and ordinary digital traces become operational resources in high-tech warfare. From the standpoint of people living through the war, the image of precise and selective technological violence is difficult to sustain. Interview accounts instead point to forms of targeting and attack in which civilians, families, and larger groups remain exposed to devastating harm, even where warfare is presented as data-driven, remote, and highly advanced.

This is closely connected to another major theme in our work: the long-standing and intensified role of surveillance. In Gaza, civilians describe living under conditions of pervasive monitoring and deep uncertainty, shaped by a broader history of control that precedes October 2023 and has taken on extreme forms during the current war. Participants describe an environment in which they often cannot know what data is being collected, how it is interpreted, or when surveillance may turn into action. This opacity affects communication choices, movement, and assessments of safety. Rather than a straightforward trade-off between convenience and privacy, our material points to a condition of enforced exposure, where digital traces may become consequential in ways that remain largely invisible to those affected.

A further focus of our research concerns everyday digital life under war. Even amid destruction, displacement, and the collapse of basic infrastructure, mobile phones and platform-based communication remain essential for survival. Based on interviews with displaced Gazans and intermediaries, and remote communication with informants still in Gaza when feasible and safe, we document how people rely on mobiles to coordinate evacuation, locate relatives, obtain information about routes and areas perceived as safer, access humanitarian updates, and sustain family life across separation. At the same time, connectivity is fragile and uneven, depending on damaged networks, scarce electricity, limited repair options, and risky charging practices.

Methodologically, this research is shaped by the constraints of studying conflict under surveillance and restricted access. Since foreign researchers and journalists have not been able to enter Gaza, we conducted in-person interviews during a research stay in Cairo in September 2025 with Palestinians who had fled the war, alongside interviews with people supporting Gazan refugees and individuals with relevant political and historical expertise. We complemented this with remote communication from October 2025 to February 2026 with informants still in Gaza, when possible. To reduce risk, interviews were open-ended; we avoided audio recordings and written consent forms and produced careful anonymized summaries after conversations. Analysis was conducted through team-based inductive coding and collaborative memory, with participant protection as a central priority.

Overall, this line of research contributes to socio-informatics and HCI by showing that digital technologies in war are not only tools for communication, coordination, or care. They can also become part of socio-technical systems of surveillance, targeting, and large-scale violence. Studying Gaza in this way helps us understand how ordinary technologies such as phones, messaging apps, social media, and data infrastructures are entangled with coercion and harm, and why research on digital life in conflict must take violence, uncertainty, and asymmetrical power as constitutive conditions rather than as background factors.

Iran

Iran has a long and layered political history, from ancient state formations to the establishment of the Islamic Republic after the 1979 revolution. Since then, the country has been governed through a combination of theocratic authority, security-centered rule, and limited electoral institutions. Over the last decades, political dissent has repeatedly been met with repression, while digital infrastructures have become central to both governance and resistance. Internet filtering, surveillance, throttling, and selective shutdowns now shape how citizens communicate, organize, access services, and endure crisis. At the same time, social media, messaging platforms, and circumvention tools remain indispensable for everyday life, political expression, and collective action in Iran.

A foundational concern in this body of research is how digital technologies are embedded in authoritarian forms of control and how citizens respond through appropriation, improvisation, and infrastructural adaptation. Earlier work on internet filtering in Iran showed that digital restriction cannot be understood only as a technical matter of blocking platforms. Rather, it is deeply entangled with social regulation, private life, and political power. That work demonstrated how young urban Iranians learn from an early stage to use proxies and VPNs not only to access blocked platforms, but also to navigate restrictions in everyday life. These skills, initially tied to private and personal needs, become politically significant during moments of unrest. In this way, the research developed the concepts of counter-appropriation and counter-public to explain how citizens circumvent and respond to increasingly sophisticated state interventions in the digital sphere.

Work on the 2019 protests further showed that what was widely described as an “internet shutdown” was more accurately a temporary nationalization of the internet: a techno-political strategy that severed access to international platforms while preserving selected domestic connectivity and state-aligned services. This analysis highlighted that digital infrastructures themselves become a terrain of political struggle, and that citizens respond not only through protest, but also through creative forms of counter-appropriation, both technical and non-technical, in order to sustain communication, coordination, and agency under repression.

This line of inquiry becomes even more pronounced in research on the Women–Life–Freedom movement. Here, the focus is no longer only on how citizens use circumvention tools, but on how they build, share, repair, teach, and maintain them under conditions of intensified censorship and risk. This work documents a shift from reliance on commercial VPNs toward grassroots infrastructuring: the collaborative creation of ad hoc VPNs, proxies, trust networks, repair practices, and informal pedagogies that sustain communication and political participation when ordinary access is disrupted. It argues that under authoritarian repression, digital tinkering becomes survival work and that infrastructures of resistance are co-produced through care, logistics, trust, and collective learning. This research, presented as From Using to Infrastructuring: Grassroots VPN-Building in Iran’s Women–Life–Freedom Movement, received a Best Paper Award at CHI 2026.

Another important strand of this work focuses on Kurdish border regions in western Iran, especially in and around Kermanshah, where conflict is experienced not only through direct repression but also through long histories of marginalization, sanctions, and infrastructural neglect. Research in this area examines how high-risk communities use GPS applications, VPNs, encrypted messaging, and social media for navigation, coordination, care, and political visibility, while these same technologies simultaneously increase exposure to surveillance and danger. The key analytical contribution here is to show that digital technologies in authoritarian borderlands are never simply empowering or simply oppressive; rather, they mediate a fragile tension between solidarity and exposure, survival and vulnerability.

This perspective is developed further in work on crisis governance during the COVID-19 pandemic in Kermanshah Province. That study introduces the concept of forced trust to explain situations in which citizens are compelled to rely on state-controlled digital systems despite deep mistrust and the absence of credible alternatives. It shows how crisis computing in authoritarian settings can serve a dual function: enabling public-health coordination while simultaneously extending digital control, behavioral monitoring, and informational domination. In this case, people engaged with government-backed platforms not because they trusted them, but because refusal was costly and alternatives were limited. At the same time, they turned to encrypted messaging, social media, and peer-based information networks as countermeasures, revealing how crisis infrastructures become sites of coercion as well as resistance.

A related body of work examines digital life beyond spectacular moments of protest by focusing on older adults in Iran. This research shows that technology appropriation among older people is shaped not only by familiar issues such as literacy, interface complexity, aging-related limitations, and unequal access, but also by filtering, surveillance, and the VPN-dependent nature of routine communication. In this context, even basic acts such as staying in touch with family via WhatsApp may depend on informal support networks, especially children and relatives who help manage updates, filtering, and access breakdowns. The study makes an important conceptual move by showing that digital exclusion in Iran is often a form of double marginalization: first through design and literacy barriers, and second through political infrastructures of censorship and control. It therefore argues for a more politically aware and culturally situated understanding of digital inclusion in constrained settings.

Taken together, these studies show that conflict in Iran cannot be understood only through visible violence, arrests, or street confrontation. It must also be understood infrastructurally: through filtering, shutdowns, surveillance, coerced platform use, uneven access, and the everyday labor required to keep communication possible. Across protest movements, public-health crises, and daily life under authoritarian rule, citizens engage in forms of repair, circumvention, negotiation, and collective support that sustain connection and agency under pressure. This body of work therefore contributes to socio-informatics, HCI, and CSCW by demonstrating how conflict unfolds through infrastructures of control, and how citizens respond through counter-appropriation, grassroots infrastructuring, and solidarity practices in the shadow of repression.

A methodological concern running through this research is how to study politically sensitive and conflict-affected contexts responsibly. Since 2018, this work has involved in-country and remote research across multiple urban centers and marginalized regions in Iran, while paying close attention to anonymity, data security, participant safety, and the ethical constraints of conducting research under surveillance. In this sense, the work contributes not only empirical insight into conflict and digital infrastructures in Iran, but also broader reflections on how politically sensitive, activist-leaning, and infrastructure-focused research can be carried out under authoritarian conditions.

References

Qalandar, S., Engelbutzeder, P., Randall, D., & Wulf, V. (2026). From Using to Infrastructuring: Grassroots VPN-Building in Iran’s Women–Life–Freedom Movement. In *Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems*. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790369

Qalandar, S., Engelbutzeder, P., Randall, D., & Wulf, V. (2026). Between empowerment and exposure: Interaction and solidarity in the shadow of surveillance among Iranian Kurdish Kolbars. Manuscript under review for *Interacting with Computers Journal*.

Qalandar, S., Aal, K., Navumau, V., Tolmie, P., Rohde, M., & Wulf, V. (2026). Handling surveillance and suppression in the field: Reflections on activist-leaning research under authoritarian rule. Manuscript in preparation for *ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction*.

Qalandar, S., Grinko, M., Randall, D., & Wulf, V. (2025). Forced trust and digital control in a global health crisis: The case of a marginalized community in Iran’s Kermanshah Province. In *Proceedings of the Sixth Decennial Aarhus Conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR 2025)*. https://doi.org/10.1145/3744169.3744177

Ghadamighalandari, P., Amirkhani, S., Aal, K., Mueller, C., & Wulf, V. (2025). Between connection and control: Technology appropriation by older adults in Iran. In *Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Communities & Technologies (C&T 2025)*. https://doi.org/10.1145/3742800.3742833

Grinko, M., Qalandar, S., Randall, D., & Wulf, V. (2022). Nationalizing the internet to break a protest movement: Internet shutdown and counter-appropriation in Iran of late 2019. *Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6*(CSCW2), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555205

Wulf, V., Randall, D., Aal, K., & Rohde, M. (2022). The personal is the political: Internet filtering and counter appropriation in the Islamic Republic of Iran. *Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 31*, 373–409. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-022-09426-7

Research on social studies

There is a paradox in the world: on the one hand, one in eleven peoplelives
not knowing where to get their next meal, but on the other hand, one fifth of all foodis wasted.
is wasted. Various initiatives are tackling this problem. One well-known example in Germany is the food bank, which passes on food that can no longer be sold to people in need free of charge. Foodsharing, a social movement, takes a similar approach: Volunteers collect expired but still edible food from supermarkets, cafés, canteens and markets and redistribute it among friends and acquaintances or via publicly accessible "fair sharers". In contrast to the food bank, no proof of need is required for food sharing.

Since the Foodsharing e.V. association was founded in 2012, 205 million kilograms of food have been saved from the garbage can. The movement, which now has more than 440,000 members, is organized via an online platform. This is developed and edited open-source by a small number of volunteer programmers. Users have the opportunity to make suggestions and requests for platform development via a forum. Our team, consisting of Leonie Jahn, Philip Engelbutzeder, Lea Michel and Anton Ballmeier, is looking at how the platform developers cooperate with the users, what both groups need for successful engagement and how cooperation can be supported. To do this, we take an action research approach, which means we get involved in the aforementioned contexts and develop solutions together with those who are affected by them. For example, we provide support for the website or organize hackathons where users and programmers can exchange ideas.

Users who have problems with the website, such as not being able to log in or register for slots to pick up leftover food, can contact the support team. Although many queries can be resolved by simply logging out and logging in, there are occasional reports that require a little more troubleshooting. Sometimes problems are reported that are already known; in this case there are usually short articles on the support website describing the problem and a possible work-around. If problems accumulate for which these articles do not yet exist, the error must first be traced. This information can then be used to create an issue in the development system so that the developers know exactly what the error is and when it occurs. Support work often requires a lot of patience: users are often not familiar with terms that have become commonplace for us. Here, it is important to remain friendly even when asked several times. At the same time, we often have cases where technical support cannot do anything, such as personal disputes between members of a district. In such cases, we usually refer them to the appropriate contact person.

Since December 2024, we have also had one of the platform's developers on the team as a student employee. He attaches great importance to communicating with users and is very active in the corresponding forum. The features and suggestions for improvement that he programs for the platform are usually coordinated with the forum and have to be cross-checked by other developers before they are released in the beta version of the platform. There, users can test the new feature and report bugs before they are released on the main platform.

In 2023, we looked at exactly how the cooperation between the two groups works. We found out that many users don't know who is behind the platform development or are afraid to get involved due to a lack of IT knowledge. It also became clear that the programmers would like to work more with users and are also dependent on help. Ultimately, we found out that there is another group in addition to users and programmers: the intermediaries. Intermediaries support communication between the other two groups and are usually users without programming skills. Instead, they have taken on other important tasks. These include summarizing suggestions for improvement and creating votes on them, creating so-called issues (i.e. a detailed description of problems when using the platform) for development, or making design proposals based on the discussion and voting results, which the developers can use for orientation. Intermediaries are therefore an important part of the movement.

After a developer announced at the end of 2023 that he no longer had the drive to program the platform and needed a break, we started to address the issue of motivation. In an already small team of programmers, it is fatal when volunteers leave, which led us to the question of what motivated these volunteers in the beginning, how their motivation has changed, and what they need to stay motivated. It turned out that most of the developers found their way to the IT team via the platform, meaning that they were already involved as food rescuers. In addition to their interest in food rescue and supporting the movement through their IT skills, it also became clear that the programmers support the open source idea: Software should be for everyone, and social movements cannot rely on proprietary platforms that act against the interests of the movement.

In addition to these initial reasons for engaging in platform programming, we were able to recognize that the motivation of developers evolves dynamically. In addition to the initial motivations, there was also the desire to finish what they had started, to continue supporting the small team or increased motivation due to user gratitude. However, all of the programmers interviewed reported that they lost motivation over the course of their involvement due to various factors. These included, for example, poor communication with the board of the association that legally operates the platform or users, or an unfriendly working atmosphere created by individual other participants. For example, all interviewees took a break and then returned, but of course there are also examples of programmers who did not work on the platform again after their break.

Ultimately, we asked ourselves what developers need to stay motivated and support platform programming. Appreciation of their work by others seemed to be an important factor. At the same time, we have noticed that the platform is becoming more professional: From an initially purely volunteer-based movement, some paid positions have emerged, and with a major fundraising campaign last year, more funds are now available to support the movement and its working groups. As a next step, we would like to find out how volunteers (both users and programmers) feel about paying individuals, because as with any volunteer project, there is a discussion to be had: Which services should be paid for - and which should not?

Our previous publications on the topic:

• Leonie Jahn, Philip Engelbutzeder, Dave Randall, Yannick Bollmann, Vasilis Ntouros, Lea Katharina Michel, and Volker Wulf. 2024. In Between Users and Developers: Serendipitous Connections and Intermediaries in Volunteer-Driven Open-Source Software Development. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 924, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642541
• Leonie Jahn, Philip Engelbutzeder, Lea Katharina Michel, Sebastian Prost, Michael Bernard Twidale, Dave Randall, and Volker Wulf. 2025. Blending Code and Cause: Understanding the Dynamic Motivations of Volunteer Developers in community-driven FOSS projects. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713416