CSCW 2020: A series of firsts!

Over the past few days, I had the incredible opportunity to attend the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) conference. Although the conference began on Saturday, October 17th, I could not register in any of the workshops held on the first two days of the conference. Therefore, I attended the paper presentations from Monday, October 19th to Wednesday, October 21, 2020. This was both my first time attending CSCW and a virtual conference. I found this experience to be incredibly enriching as a first time attendee and look forward to attending future conferences to both learn from the outstanding work in the field and hopefully display some of my own work to the community.

On Sunday night, as I set my alarm for 5.15am to wake up for the conference, I could not help but feel wistful. The conference was being held virtually obviously because of the pandemic, but in the pre-pandemic world, it was supposed to be held in Minneapolis, MN. Having spent four years there and built quite a strong community, I am always finding myself missing Minneapolis in the time I’ve been in Seattle. CSCW being virtual served up another one of those unwanted reminders of the fact that were it not for the pandemic, I could have been in the city that I love attending that conference.

The conference was hosted on Clowdr, an open source virtual conference platform that allows audio and video chats between participants through integrations with Zoom or Twilio. The interface was really easy to use, and allowed me to view the program the day before to mark some panels I was interested in as favorites so I would not have to look for them on the day of. Each panel had a title and a list of papers that were going to be presented in it, and each paper then had a short video made by the authors. The panels were hosted live in the form of Zoom webinars, where the videos were played and after each video, there was a time to ask questions of the authors via the chat. There was also a provision for breakout rooms themed around one or more papers, where interested people could interact with the authors over a longer period of time. There were also social events, such as a virtual bike tour of Minneapolis, that attendees could participate in. I felt that the conference was very well organized, given the challenges of the pandemic and the virtual setting.

The conference opened with on Monday with a keynote from Dr. Maryam Zaringhalam, the Data Science and Open Science Officer in the National Library of Medicine’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. In her address titled Storytelling for a More Equitable Open Science Enterprise, Dr. Zaringhalam focused on how some techniques of communicating scientific content more openly and effectively. After that, the rest of the day focused on the different conference panels that attendees could choose to attend. I began with the panel on Data and Social Media for Health, a panel which grouped together papers that focused on leveraging the many facets of social media to approach various challenges in global healthcare situations. I then moved over to a panel titled Social Support, Donations and Money, which explored the evolving nature of support for patients with various health conditions and the changing nature of moneywork in today’s world. This panel was particularly special for me because in it, Zachary Levonian, a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota presented a paper titled Patterns of Patient and Caregiver Mutual Support Connections in an Online Health Community, on which I was one of the student authors! After the two panels, there was a Diversity and Inclusion social hour hosted on Mozilla Hubs but by this point, I was both burnt out from the early morning and my computer was starting to overheat with Hubs so I decided to call it a day.

The next day, I began at 5am sharp with a panel titled Coordination and Collaboration, which consisted of papers that discussed leveraging technology in emotion perceptions and the changing face and methods of collaboration in this online world. I then attended a panel titled Learning, Education and Mentoring, a panel that focused on research in the education sector. I then attended the poster presentations titled Data Science, where I saw some posters from all over the data science community. The day closed with a virtual bike tour of Minneapolis, but I missed the city and the people there too much to attend it.

On the final day, I began with attending a panel on Online Community Reflections where the papers focused on research in online platforms and social media sites. That session contained my personal favorite, an Honorable Mention winning paper titled Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities led by Dr. Casey Fiesler from the University of Colorado, Boulder. The paper talked about users’ migrations to and from several online platforms and examined the possible reasons behind those movements, using transformative fandoms as the data point. I thoroughly enjoyed the session as it aligned well with my own background and interests and reached out to connect with Dr. Fiesler after.

The conference ended with a keynote address titled Art of the Possible: Showcasing Data Science Solutions for a Better World, led by Afua Bruce is Chief Program Officer for DataKind. The talk was really informative and focused on six components of high impact, successful data for good programs. It was the perfect way to round off a conference that was very educational and allowed me to make a lot of great connections. As a first time attendee to a conference in this field, I came away with a lasting admiration for the amazing work done in the field and the determination to return in future years presenting work of my own.

References:

1. Levonian, Zachary, Marco Dow, Drew Erikson, Sourojit Ghosh, Hannah Miller Hillberg, Saumik Narayanan, Loren Terveen, and Svetlana Yarosh. "Patterns of Patient and Caregiver Mutual Support Connections in an Online Health Community." arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.16172 (2020).
2. Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym. 2020. Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW1, Article 042 (May 2020), 25 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3392847