We are excited to welcome you to the 24th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). This is the second CSCW to be held virtually, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose challenges at every scale from global to local. Our community remains poised for lasting impact in the face of these challenges and beyond, and we look forward to the conversations and interactions that will surely happen over the next few days.
While we (anxiously) look forward to meeting you all again in person, we continue to see a virtual conference as an opportunity to apply our community’s insights about virtual work, broaden access/participation in our community, and derive knowledge and ingenuity that will benefit future events. For example, two systems for building knowledge at online conferences were tested at CSCW 2020. CSCW 2021 will provide further opportunities for innovation.
We are confident that we offer you a strong and extremely rich program, thanks to all of your submissions and the efforts of countless volunteers. There will be 340 paper presentations, reflecting submissions from October, 2020 – April, 2021 to the CSCW issues of PACM-HCI. Integrated into the program, you will also find 3 panels featuring vibrant discussions of globally pertinent issues. You will not want to miss our virtual posters and demos session, with 46 posters and 5 demos. Over the weekend, 15 workshops met and a new cohort of doctoral students was mentored in our Doctoral Consortium.
We also strongly encourage you to attend our plenary sessions.
- In Monday morning’s opening keynote, Josephine Miliza, of the Association of Progressive Communications-LOCNET project, will discuss how community networks in Africa are contributing towards ending the social and economic isolation of the unserved and underserved communities through digital inclusion.
- On Tuesday, join us for the CSCW Town Hall to help plan for our community’s future, and to honor influential work from our past at the Lasting Impact Award session.
- In Wednesday afternoon’s closing keynote, Mary Gray, of Microsoft Research and Indiana University, will trace the history and tacit theory of power embedded in the practice of software ‘dogfooding’ to argue for the need to develop an explicit analysis of power in computing.
CSCW is made possible every year by an extraordinary group of dedicated individuals and supporters. Planning for a fully online conference of this size and scope raised some completely new challenges even for seasoned conference organizers. We extend our thanks on behalf of the community to our organizing committee, program committees, student volunteers, conference planners, PACM-HCI editors, SIGCHI volunteers, ACM’s staff, reviewers, and everybody else who played a role in making this event possible. We also thank SIGCHI for its sponsorship and our generous supporters: Facebook, Google, The National Science Foundation, Userfocus, Microsoft, Spotify, The Underwood Institute, and Adobe.
We hope that you find valuable opportunities to learn, connect with new and familiar colleagues from around the world, and engage in thought-provoking conversations over the next few days.
Jeremy Birnholtz
CSCW ’21 General Co-Chair
Northwestern University, USA
Luigina Ciolfi
CSCW ’21 General Co-Chair
University College Cork, Ireland