Bridging the Digital Divide: Relational Autonomy, Care and Trust in Community Service Desks

As governments adopt digital-by-default public services, vulnerable populations risk growing exclusion from essential civic support. This paper examines Balcão do Bairro (BB), a community-based service in Portugal that supports marginalised groups navigate the digital bureaucracy. Drawing on a four-month qualitative study—including ethnographic observation and interviews with service desk technicians and neighbours—we explore BB’s role as a middle-out relational infrastructure bridging institutional gaps. Our findings reveal a model grounded in relational autonomy, trust, care, and empowerment, enabling long-term community engagement and effective mediation of bureaucratic hurdles. Despite its impact, BB struggles with fragmented communication tools, informal knowledge management, and funding pressures tied to inadequate performance metrics. We identify four design opportunities rooted in BB’s practices, such as trust and care to strengthen relational engagement, formal feedback loops to inform policy, shared knowledge systems, and storytelling tools to capture BB’s impact. This work contributes to HCI and Digital Civics by challenging transactional service models and foregrounding the value of relational autonomy, care and sustained trust-building in digital inclusion efforts.