Al Osool: Understanding information behavior for community development at Za'atari Syrian refugee camp

Za'atari Syrian Refugee Camp in Jordan is home to about 83,000 people fleeing the violence in Syria. Building on a multi-year engagement at Za'atari, we developed an information-enabled community engagement approach to identify and address challenges at the camp, engage community members in problem solving and increase self- reliance. Using HCI mixed methods, we facilitated the creation of a community-commissioned database of household assets, being implemented by the UNHCR with potential for adoption in other refugee camps. Our main contributions are participatory approaches to understanding information behaviors within a fragmented social fabric in high-constraint, low-affordance settings resulting from armed conflict. This work generates insights valuable for researchers and designers working with refugees.