CALL FOR INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVES

• Wednesday, July 1, 2026: Deadline for submissions due 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (AoE)
• Wednesday, July 15, 2026: Notification of acceptance

CSCW has always been drawn to the messy reality of how people actually work together. The Industry Perspectives track extends that commitment by creating space for a particular kind of contribution: one grounded in the experience of building, deploying, and living with sociotechnical systems at industry scale.

We are not looking for sanitized success stories. We are looking for insights from operating under conditions that most research settings cannot replicate: scale, organizational constraints, competing priorities, and the irreversibility of decisions made in production.

Submissions should address topics squarely within the CSCW remit: cooperative work, social computing, and the design and use of technologies that mediate human collaboration. The human dimension is central. A compelling technical contribution is not enough on its own; we want to understand what it meant for the people using the system, the teams building it, or the organizations it touched.

Within that scope, we welcome contributions on topics that include, but are not limited to:

• Designing for collaboration in the real world. Supporting coordination and collective work when the context is distributed, underspecified, and users are not fully knowable in advance.
• Deployment stories and lessons learned. What changed after release, what you got wrong, and what you would do differently.
• AI in collaborative contexts. What you have learned from putting AI into the fabric of collaborative work, including the harder questions around trust, accountability, and control.
• Work practices and organizational realities. How the systems you have built reshaped, or were reshaped by, existing power structures, incentives, and habits.
• Infrastructure, platforms, and ecosystems. What it looks like to build and maintain the substrate that others build on, including governance and interoperability.
• Ethics, responsibility, and impact. How privacy, fairness, and safety considerations actually played out in practice, including when they lost to other pressures.
• Bridging research and practice. What the translation process between a finding and a deployed feature looks like, and where it breaks down.

This is a non-archival track. Submissions do not need to present novel theory or complete work. We are not looking for papers that have been dressed up to look like research. We are looking for papers that take the epistemic value of practice seriously, meaning they are willing to surface trade-offs, constraints, and failures alongside whatever worked. The CSCW community learns more from a careful description of why something failed than from a selective account of why something succeeded.

Submissions must include at least one author with a non-academic affiliation. We welcome contributions from industry practitioners, R&D teams, industry-academic collaborators, and practitioners engaged in doctoral or applied research within industry contexts. We also welcome contributions from policy organizations, NGOs, and public sector teams working on sociotechnical systems that affect how people collaborate and coordinate. At least one author must hold a non-academic affiliation. If you have been building systems that bear on how people collaborate or social computing and you have something to say about what you have learned, this track is for you.

Submissions should be submitted using the Precision Conference System (PCS) 2.0: https://new.precisionconference.com. Please make sure you are in the CSCW 2026 Industry Perspectives track when submitting.

We welcome the following submission types:

• Lightening Talk proposals should be extended abstracts of 3-4 pages, ACM Master Article Submission Template, single-column, excluding references. These talks will be 5-10 minutes, depending on scheduling constraints.
• Panel Proposals should be 2 to 4 pages using the same ACM Master Article Submission Template, single-column, excluding references. Proposals should describe the topic and its relevance to CSCW, the format and intended structure of the session, the questions the panel will address, and the background and affiliations of proposed panelists. Panels should represent a range of perspectives and should be designed to generate discussion rather than sequential presentations. All panelists must attend in person. These will be 60-90 minutes, depending on scheduling constraints.
• Demo Proposals should be 2 to 4 pages using the same ACM Master Article Submission Template, single-column, excluding references. Proposals should describe the system or artifact being demonstrated, what attendees will experience and interact with, the technical requirements for the demonstration, and why the work is relevant to the CSCW community. Authors should indicate whether the demo requires special setup, space, or equipment. This will be a part of the main reception and poster session on Monday night of the conference (October 12).

Industry Perspectives track submissions should use the ACM single column format, including all figures but excluding references:

• Word
• Latex
• Overleaf

Each submission should address: the context and problem space, the system or approach or experience you are reflecting on, and the key insights or open questions you are bringing to the community. Supplementary materials such as video, slides, or documentation are welcome, but the submission must stand on its own.

All submissions are non-anonymous. Supplementary materials are welcome but the submission must stand on its own. All submissions must comply with ACM formatting and SIGCHI accessibility guidelines and adhere to ACM policy on generative AI.

Submission deadline: July 1, 2026. All deadlines are AoE.

Notification of acceptance will go out July 15, 2026.

Because the research community benefits from knowing what practice actually looks like in the industry. Because the CSCW community is stronger when the people building the systems it studies are in the room.

For questions, contact the Industry Perspectives Chairs at industry2026@cscw.acm.org.

Review and selection are conducted by the Industry Perspectives Track Co-Chairs. Because submissions are not reviewed by a full committee, authors should not expect detailed formal feedback on their submission. Selection will be based on the following criteria:

• Appeal to the community. Is the topic timely and of wide enough interest to attract meaningful attendance? Is it focused enough to allow productive discussion within the time available at the conference? Topics that are too narrow risk thin attendance; topics that are too broad make it difficult to make progress in a single session.
• Format. Is the proposed format conducive to discussion and shared insight? Will it be possible to achieve the stated aims?
• Diversity of perspectives. Submissions that demonstrate breadth across organizations, disciplines, and communities are stronger for it. Organizers should describe the intended audience and the range of perspectives the session will accommodate. Panel and demo proposals are ideally authored by individuals representing at least two different organizations.
• Continuity. Does the submission connect to a longer-term thread of interest, within CSCW or across adjacent communities? If the topic is new or a revival, authors should make the case that it will persist beyond the moment.
• Anonymity. Submissions are not anonymous and should not contain sensitive, private, or proprietary information that cannot be disclosed at publication time. Confidentiality will be maintained during review. Rejected submissions will be kept confidential in perpetuity. For accepted submissions, title and author information may be published on the website prior to the conference.

All presenters and panelists must be registered for the conference and are responsible for their own registration fees.

• Youyang Hou (Notion, USA)
• Tejas Peesapati (Amazon, USA)

Contact: industry2026@cscw.acm.org