Panels

Important Dates

Panel reviews and decisions will be returned 2-4 weeks after the deadline.
What is a Panel?
A panel is a collection of people discussing a topic important to our field with energy, insight, and verve. Great panels are an excellent way to generate debate, raise new and interesting issues at CSCW, and hear multiple points of view on a given topic. CSCW panels are a forum for discussing provocative, controversial, innovative, emerging, boundary-spanning, and boundary-breaking issues.
While paper sessions provide detailed discussions of recently completed work, panels provide an opportunity to hear from researchers in the field about what is on the horizon—or what is already here but not yet recognized, acknowledged, or discussed.

Special Topics for 2020

The panels chairs are especially interested in proposals around the following topics:

  • Impacting policy and informing policymaking
  • Futurism, especially Afrofuturism and/or Chicanofuturism, and CSCW
  • Fictions, i.e., science fiction, design fiction
  • Structural inequality and methods to counter historical injustice

Criteria for Successful Panels

The best panels provide opportunities for audience participation. We especially encourage proposals for panels that:

  • Discuss relevant, important, and critical topics
  • Engage the audience and provoke discussion
  • Bring several disciplines, methods, or approaches into productive conversation
  • Represent a diversity of individuals, who can bring multiple perspectives to the topic
    We also invite submitters to not only form panels with close colleagues who share similar points of view but also to reach out to prospective panelists from across the CSCW community and beyond. Feel free to contact other CSCW scholars, or use media like the #cscw2020 Twitter hashtag, or CSCW Community, CSCW Meta Facebook groups to try and find panelists who might want to discuss a particular topic from various approaches. We are also interested in panels that include representation from practitioners, activists, and scholars from other fields that may provide additional insight into the topic.

Potential Formats for 2020

CSCW 2020 is a virtual conference, which presents both challenges and opportunities for panels. We encourage organizers to be both creative and reasonable in their proposals and to consider the labor and technology requirements they would need for their panel to be successful. Here are a couple of ideas for structuring virtual panels, and we invite organizers to share their own ideas:

  • Daily themes where panel organizers are responsible for programming related to whatever themes they have proposed for the day
  • Short, asynchronous video presentations from each panelist (5 min max) paired with synchronous component so that participants and panels can interact

Submitting a Proposal
Panel proposals should be no longer than 4 pages in the SIGCHI Extended Abstract Format (Word, Latex). References do not count against the page-limit, and you may omit the CCS concepts, keywords, and citation from the first page. Proposals should include:

  • Overview of the panel’s topic(s) and its relevance to the CSCW community
  • Proposed structure and format of the panel, including how panel organizers will
  • Encourage interaction with the audience
  • Ensure the panel is accessible to all participants (see ACCESS tips for ensuring accessibility)
  • Whether and for how long panelists expect synchronous interaction
  • One-paragraph biographical sketches of the panelists describing their expertise
  • Any technical requirements
    Panel submissions should be e-mailed to the Panels Co-Chairs at panels2020@cscw.acm.org.

All panel submissions are due by 11:59pm AoE, July 1, 2020.
All questions should be directed to panels2020@cscw.acm.org.
Panels Co-Chairs
Sheena Erete (DePaul University)
Libby Hemphill (University of Michigan)
panels2020@cscw.acm.org