We are excited to share with you our vision of CSCW 2022 as an experimental virtual conference. This is built on the collective lessons learned from our experiences running and attending virtual conferences. While there remain many kinks and details to work out, we hope this post will provide clarity to authors and attendees.
The core idea we have been playing with is: “What if virtual conferences were not an attempt to replicate physical conferences?” How would we share our findings? How would we connect with one another? How would we create spaces for newcomers to connect with the community? What new ways can we engage our diverse community?
PRINCIPLES
We established several guiding principles for CSCW 2022, aligned with the goals established by CSCW organizers before us. These principles helped us to guide our thought experiments:
- Provide global scholars with ways to present and discuss their work;
- Create opportunities for emerging scholars to network with others: to connect with their global cohort, and to connect with more established scholars;
- Provide opportunities for scholars to intersect and interact with others;
- Provide opportunities for our diverse community to participate;
- Ensure we connect CSCW with Taiwan and Asia.
OUR APPROACH
Our approach is centered on three major ideas: (1) a robust asynchronous program; (2) CSCW as a multi-week experience; (3) new opportunities designed for emerging scholars.
Robust Asynchronous Program
We will use a platform to enable asynchronous delivery of conference talks, and facilitate long-running discussions with authors. Succinctly, we will ask authors to prepare video presentations that attendees can view at their convenience, and provide a platform that will support Q&A and discussion between attendees and authors.
On-demand paper presentations. Attendees can watch, at their convenience, pre-recorded presentations by authors. These videos will ultimately form part of the long-running, archival legacy of each piece of research that is part of CSCW 2022.
Asynchronous discussion. Each paper will have its own dedicated discussion channel, deep-linked from the online program, facilitating thoughtful discussion between attendees and authors. We have seen great success in recent conferences with the use of Discord to support these discussions.
CSCW as a Multi-Week Experience
“Must-attend events.” CSCW will have several short weekly synchronous sessions where the community can gather and interact. These ~2h sessions will center on exciting events that are of broad interest to the entire community–e.g. the poster and demo reception, plenaries, panels, and town halls. These sessions will therefore be the main “meeting points” for the CSCW community.
Several venues continue to be synchronous meetings with a smaller select group of attendees. For instance, workshops and doctoral consortium events will likely continue to be run as longer synchronous sessions to facilitate timely discussion.
CSCW video stream. We will run a CSCW video stream that continuously streams presentation videos. These will be organized in sessions (e.g. groups of three to four papers presentations) and streamed on a schedule. Roughly, we expect each paper presentation to be streamed once a week.
Specific Opportunities for New and Emerging Scholars
CSCW’s inclusive mission aims to create a community for and with emerging scholars (e.g. students, newcomers to CSCW, etc.). Our aim is to support emerging scholars as they introduce themselves to each other and the community, to network with the community, and so forth.
Emerging scholar-specific micro-presentations. Emerging scholars will be given the opportunity to prepare minute-long micro-presentations to be viewed and streamed.
AMAs/Casual mentoring with senior members of the community and industry luminaries. Drawing from previous “SV lunch with stars”, we will ask senior members of the academic community to participate in hour-long AMA’s. These will be attended by a small number of emerging scholars who sign up in advance of these events.
Recruiting events by sponsors. Sponsors will have opportunities to set up information and recruiting events aimed at emerging scholars.
Other social events. We will continue to explore other opportunities, such as “Lab speed dating”.
WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU
We are excited to realize CSCW 2022 as this new kind of online conference, and would love to hear from you. If you’ve got great ideas about how to make this an even more exciting conference, please contact us chairs2022@cscw.acm.org.
