Welcome to the 23nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). This year we have faced unprecedented challenges as a global community. The coronavirus pandemic has impacted every aspect of society. We thus organized the first ever fully virtual CSCW conference.
Despite the disruption, we chose to see this as an opportunity for our community. In all of our planning we held one constant refrain: if anyone can have a successful virtual conference, CSCW can! Our community has spent more than 30 years studying how to work together when we are physically distant. We know what it means to engage socially and professionally online. We are also taking it as an opportunity to increase access to the conference for many who may not have been able to travel to a physical conference. This is a chance to apply what we know and, in the process, to learn even more. A virtual CSCW is a novel situation, but it’s also one that we have been preparing for since 1986!
This year we are also “virtually co-located” with the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST). UIST and CSCW share many common interests, and we wanted to create new opportunities for interaction across our communities. This year the CSCW and UIST conferences are being held so that the last day of CSCW (Wednesday) will be the first day of UIST. On that day we are jointly sponsoring a plenary panel and keynote, and both conferences’ general sessions will be cross-listed and available to attendees from either conference.
In addition to the papers, we have a compelling lineup for the conference this year, with 12 workshops, 13 demos, 4 panels, a doctoral consortium, and 39 posters. New this year is short videos accompanying many of these venues, available in the digital library.
We also encourage participants to attend these exciting plenary events:
- Our opening keynote on Monday will be presented by Maryam Zaringhalam of the National Library of Medicine, speaking on Storytelling for a More Equitable Open Science Enterprise
- On Wednesday, we will have A Celebration of Systems Research in Collaborative and Social Computing, a CSCW+UIST plenary panel that brings together leading researchers at the intersection of the conferences representing each decade from the 1980s through the 2020s
- Our closing keynote on Wednesday will be presented by Afua Bruce of DataKind, speaking on The Art of the Possible: Showcasing Data Science Solutions for a Better World
CSCW couldn’t happen without the immense effort and countless volunteer hours provided by members of our community. We give a heartfelt thank you to everyone involved, including editors, associate chairs, reviewers, our conference managers, the staff at ACM, the student volunteers, and especially our amazing organizing committee that started planning a physical conference and ended up organizing a virtual one.
We would like to thank ACM SIGCHI for their ongoing support of our conference, as well as our generous sponsors, Facebook, Microsoft Research, the Underwood Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. We invite you to engage in CSCW 2020 and to explore the papers and companion publications!
Matthew Bietz & Andrea Wiggins
CSCW 2020 General Chairs