ONLINE EXPERIENCE AT CSCW 2026

TL;DR: We will hold an online-only, one-day pre-conference event prior to the in-person conference dates. During this event, those who cannot attend the in-person conference will have the opportunity to present their papers. Everyone who has registered for the conference (online or in-person) will be able to attend this event.

There are many reasons why members of the CSCW community cannot, or choose not to, attend CSCW in person. These include visa challenges, geopolitical dynamics, environmental impacts of travel, travel costs, family responsibilities, and many other factors. All of these reasons made it necessary to accommodate online participation in a capacity that is rewarding for conference attendees while also feasible and sustainable for conference organizers. Based on positive feedback from last year, CSCW 2026 will use the format as CSCW 2025 again: an online-only, one-day pre-conference event held prior to the in-person conference dates.

When: The online event will take place on 1-2 October 2026 (according to the different time zones). These dates were chosen in order to be far enough away from the in-person dates so as not to affect travel plans for those attending the in-person conference. The online event will be split into three sessions; each session will last between 2 and 4 hours, with at least 2 sessions occurring during daytime in each time zone. See the table below for a tentative schedule. Please note that the following slots may change based on final attendance estimates.

Cost: Those who purchase the full in-person conference registration will also be able to attend the online day. Those attending just the online conference will have a reduced conference registration cost. Online-only registration will cost US$375 for ACM members, US$425 for non-members, and US$225 for students. Online-only attendees will have access to the online pre-conference and to the conference Discord or other communication channels.

Format for online paper presentations:

• Online presentations will be live, not pre-recorded.
• Tentative proposal (to be finalized once the number of online presentations is clear): paper sessions will be organized with 5-minute (the presentation length is subject to change based on the final number of online presentations) presentations from authors, one after the other, followed by a general panel-like discussion with questions from the audience.
• Tentative proposal (to be finalized once the number of online presentations is clear): There will be one paper session at a time, no parallel sessions.

What is and isn’t online: This year, the events happening on site in Salt Lake City during the conference will not be streamed online. Three factors drove changes in the hybrid format from CSCW 2025 to CSCW 2026: cost of livestreaming, technical difficulties with livestreaming, and low utilization of hybrid conference attendance. Costs for supporting livestreaming at the conference venue have simply become prohibitive. Plus, hybrid often results in an inferior conference experience for online attendees, marred by challenges with interacting with paper presenters and other attendees, and, more generally, it has not been conducive to feeling a sense of community that CSCW is known for. Perhaps as a consequence, utilization of hybrid conference attendance (i.e., online attendance at livestreamed in-person paper sessions) has been consistently low. For all these reasons, we decided to create two distinct events, one fully online and one fully in-person.

What is still being finalized about the CSCW 2026 online format:

• The precise time(s) when online presentations will occur.
• The precise length and format of online paper presentations.
• Papers that will be presented online (authors can expect an email inquiring about this soon).

When will those things be finalized? Once the May 2025 cycle papers have been finalized, we will reach out to authors of accepted papers to determine whether they will present in person or online. Based on the number of people who choose to present online, we will finalize the format and length guidelines for online presentations.

• Eleonora Mencarini (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
• Doug Zytko (University of Michigan, Flint, USA)

Contact: hybrid2026@cscw.acm.org

• Xinru Page (Brigham Young University, USA)
• Guo Freeman (Clemson University, USA)

Contact: chairs2026@cscw.acm.org