CSCW 2025 Town Hall Q&A

Photo by Agent J on Unsplash

During CSCW 2025 in Bergen, we held a town hall session where we heard presentations by new steering committee chair Susan Fussell, as well as updates from our 2026 general chairs (Xinru Page and Guo Freeman) and the rolling deadlines team, as represented by Amy Bruckman and Jeff Nichols. Afterward, we opened the town hall up for a Q&A session where attendees submitted questions via Slido or asked them in person.

Because not everyone could make it to the town hall (or not even to the conference), below we share questions asked during the Q&A with responses from the 2025 and 2026 chairs, as well as representatives of the steering committee and those overseeing the shift to rolling — we gave everyone two weeks to add to the document but not everyone had the bandwidth, so some responses may be limited. Remember, this is all volunteer labor!

We’ve organized the question into seven categories: Budget / Financials / Conference Location, Reviewing, Volunteering, Deadline, PACM / Manuscript Central / Publishing, Communication, and Other. Similar questions are grouped together.

Budget / Financials / Conference Location

Could you give an overview of the conference budget? CSCW is a very expensive conference but it’s not clear what we’re paying for.

• Jessica: I will prepare a separate write-up of how CSCW is organized/details on the budget. As I briefly mentioned at the town hall, this year the Grieghallen contract was US$230,000+ for rooms and A/V, while the food was around US$85,000. Norway is expensive, but we have been seeing a large increase in venue costs since the pandemic. I know this because I was one of the treasurers for CSCW 2023 and 2024, and both years, we had to increase the registration slightly to deal with rising costs.
• Fab: One thing that might be important to add in that text is the pros and cons of having conferences in hotels in comparison to convention centres. Both Costa Rica and Norway had the conference in convention centres while Minneapolis (and I guess all other CSCW conferences until the pandemics) were in hotels. Hotels, if I understand it correctly, do not charge for the rooms — there are still (high) AV costs involved — but in turn, we have to compensate with the number of nights and food. With convention centres, we do not have to be concerned with room blocks and food — although we did get a separate hotel contract, so as to guarantee good rates for attendees. In any case, we could have said that we would leave it to attendees and not go into the trouble of securing a contract with a hotel. Another thing that I would like to highlight is that the AV costs in Norway were comparable with the AV costs for Costa Rica and prior conferences — at least this is how I understood John’s comments that contracting a third party company — if Grieghallen had allowed it — would not make a big difference on the costs, especially if we were contracting the folks they used to work with. Lastly, I think it is important to mention, again, the fact that sponsorship has mostly disappeared since the pandemics. We used to have companies that would cover the poster receptions (I still remember the names of some companies associated with them), part of the dinner or entire coffee-breaks. This is no longer a reality and the costs have been shifted to participants, naturally. I can help out with drafting this post if you find it helpful.

Has there ever been a consideration to host a big conference every other year?

• Jessica: CSCW was held every other year until 2010, when it became an annual conference. While I think this is something that is worth keeping as an option, I have not seen much interest in this and I’m not sure it would have much of a financial impact (although it would certainly have a positive environmental impact to have 750 people traveling half as often!). It’s also important to note that since we have decoupled publishing research from conference attendance, there is no requirement for people to attend CSCW in order to publish their papers in PACM: HCI.
• Fab: Another thing to keep in mind is that the community, as well as its production has grown. If we are to host conferences every two years, and the production and interest to present the papers at the conference remain the same, we would have to have double the number of parallel sessions, while the number of attendees would possibly remain fairly the same — with some authors presenting several papers. This would also contribute to increasing costs.

For the purpose of reducing costs we may also consider having future CSCW in some Asian countries/regions.

• Jessica: I’m not sure if this would reduce the costs, but I believe CSCW is interested in hosting the conference in Asia. The only other time CSCW has been outside of North America prior to 2024 is when it was in China in 2008. CSCW was scheduled to be in Taiwan in 2022, but was moved to virtual due to ongoing COVID-19 concerns. Given a large contingent of CSCW researchers come from Asia, it makes sense for us to return there. I would encourage any CSCW members who are interested in taking the lead in bringing CSCW back to Asia to reach out to our steering committee.

Can we discuss site selection? Bergen is beautiful but also super expensive. || From all the places in Europe, why pick the most expensive country possible?

• Jessica: Site selection is determined by a combination of factors, including input from that year’s general chairs, the steering committee, and the executive committee, as well as considerations around the location of prior conferences and the makeup of the community. For 2025, Fabiano and I immediately began discussing the possibility of holding CSCW in Europe. As Fab is based in Norway, and proximity to the location is very useful, we initially focused on Oslo or Amsterdam. We were not able to secure a contract in Oslo and Amsterdam was deemed too expensive. As Bergen is the second-largest city in Norway, we then began exploring it as an option.
• We acknowledge Bergen is expensive, and were therefore pleased to negotiate a very reasonable hotel contract, which was quite inexpensive when two people shared a room and included breakfast. We also liked that while not a major European hub, Bergen is easy to get to from the major hubs (e.g., London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Copenhagen), making it relatively easy to get to from different parts of the world
• Fab: And, again, Norway is not the most expensive country in Europe. As mentioned above, the Netherlands would not have been less expensive than Norway, and it would have complicated the logistics of organising the conference even further. Switzerland would have definitely been more expensive than Norway.

Is this a global/international conference, or is it a US conference? Locations and paper content makes it feel like non-US researchers are just guests.

• Jessica: CSCW is an international conference. At CSCW 2025, nearly 50% of the attendees were from outside the US. Traditionally, this percentage has been much lower, with only 25–30% being from outside North America. This is a bit of a chicken-and-an-egg problem — are there more folks in the US doing CSCW research and wanting to attend the conference, or do more people in the US submit/attend because it’s usually close by geographically? This will also affect paper content — people in the US and more likely to be studying that space. The steering committee may want to look at past cycles to see if there are differences in acceptance rates for US/Western-focused research vs. other geographic regions, and to consider ways to both encourage greater participation from non-Western contexts and minimize any potential bias toward Western-focused research projects.
• Fab: The international character of the conference can be seen in the members of the Organising and Programme Committee members. Naturally, having the conference in the US makes it easier for US members of the community to attend it and for the community to grow in that region. It is nevertheless a goal of SIGCHI leadership to foster local communities in places other than the US.

Could we have a norm to announce future conference locations earlier? Given limited travel budgets, it would be helpful to know the location at submission time

• Guo: We did announce the approximate location and time of CSCW 2026 very early (before the 2025 May submission deadline) on the CSCW 2025 website to help people prepare and plan: “CSCW 2026 will be held in the USA in October 2026. We will share the exact location and date as soon as possible.” We just cannot announce the exact location and date until we sign the contract with the conference venue, which requires back and forth negotiations with the venue and getting both ACM’s and SIGCHI’s approvals.
• Jessica: For reference, we began the process of securing a location for CSCW 2025 in late 2023. We were not able to get the fully executed contract (which can only happen after the full budget is approved by ACM and they sign off on the venue contract) until October 1, 2024, meaning the process took approximately 10 months. We announced the location on the same day the contract was executed.
• Securing a location earlier on with the current model of the location being selected by general chairs means selecting general chairs even earlier (3+ years out), which is certainly possible but could be more challenging as people may be hesitant to commit to the heavy work load so far in the future when they have less certainty about what else will be happening at that time. Instead, ACM could consider selecting the location separate from the process of selecting general chairs.

Why not partner with / host at local universities (with infrastructure for big lecture halls and small classrooms) rather than fancy-schmancy private venues?

• Guo: CSCW has more than 800 attendees (700+ in person). If we were a single track conference with many fewer attendees (such as CHI PLAY), we might be able to host the conference on a university campus during their breaks (such as fall break) without interrupting students’ regular activities. However, with the size of CSCW (needing many conference rooms and sufficient technological setups to host parallel sessions and reception) and the number of attendees (needing hotel rooms for 700–800 people), it is very challenging to fit this conference on a university campus without overwhelming their facilities and disrupting their regular campus life.
• Jessica: In addition, hosting conferences at universities during the academic year is incredibly challenging. There will likely be much more limited room availability and we would have to carefully navigate other events that might be occurring on campus.

Considering travel restrictions (e.g. visa issues) shall we consider concurrent regional sub-conferences as some AI venues are having? || We’ve had a regional ACM SIGCHI chapter in Atlanta/US Southeast — could we have more formalized regional conferences (+ incl online access to main conference?) || What about with rolling submissions we have rolling regional conferences?

• Jessica: I certainly encourage folks to think about regional/local events for HCI and CSCW researchers, but I do not think CSCW organizing multiple simultaneous conferences for the annual conference is feasible at this time, especially given how challenging it is to get enough volunteers to support the main event. One thing I have been doing this year in my area (Washington DC region) is connecting with HCI groups from the Mid-Atlantic region. We will be launching a regional SIGCHI chapter and using that to share resources and host local events. My lab at Maryland (HCIL) has been hosting an annual research symposium for more than 40 years; if your region has sufficient CSCW/HCI researchers, start connecting with them to talk about ideas for how to increase local opportunities. Another issue that Sue mentioned was that when this discussion has come up in the past, people have noted that we will never be able to accommodate everyone — there will always be people outside the regional areas — and thus it will be unfair to some.
• Fab: it is also important to think about the consequences of this. My understanding is that, if we are formalising satellite events, the main conference would be significantly smaller. I don’t think that it is feasible to think that folks would be attending their local conferences AND a main conference somewhere far away from them. This would go against the purpose of having those satellite events in my view. One of the questions would be: would the ‘main’ conference financially viable? I know for a fact that some conferences have been under a lot of stress after moving to a journal publication model that would not require people to attend. Nevertheless, it seems that people still find meeting at conferences valuable and those conferences have been surviving so far. ACM SIGCHI have been discussing the idea of having some of their conferences co-located. There will be definitely questions on how to handle finances, starting from registration fees all through the overheads that conferences are expected to produce.

Would adding exhibition booths help attract sponsorship?

• Jessica: This is already an option for sponsors, so I think the short answer is no.

Any plan to reengage with our industry sponsors? Students need that and the community can benefit from it to provide a better conference experience. || What happened to industry sponsorship? Why is it so low?

• Jessica: We never purposefully disengaged with industry sponsors. Sponsorships have severely decreased since the pandemic. Two major reasons for this are the significant layoffs in the tech sector happening over the last several years — companies are downsizing so they are not sending their teams to conferences to recruit — and the shifting focus toward tech-heavy AI applications. I have heard from multiple major tech companies that they are only sponsoring the biggest AI conferences. CSCW publishes a lot of AI research, but I think generally this is not the research these companies are most interested in.
• Fab: There is also the fact that to successfully attract sponsorship, one needs to have contacts with the private sector. Most of our volunteers do not have this contact, not so intimately to request sponsorships and expect that it will be granted. Another difficulty refers to the programme of the conference. This year, potential sponsors have asked our sponsorship chairs more than once if they could see the conference programme. We could show programmes of recent past conferences, but the programme for the 2025 conference was not ready until one month before the conference, which would already be too late to get sponsors acknowledged in our companion. My recommendation here would be to people serving for longer terms in the sponsorship role, so they can build and help sustain the relationship with potential sponsors, but honestly I think this would not be a reality. It seems to me that ACM SIGCHI should have trained personnel to make the bridge between conference sponsorship chairs and potential sponsors.

Reviewing

It is incredibly painful to have CSCW and CHI reviews overlapping so directly right now. How can this be improved? || July hits European holiday season. || July deadline conflicts with CHI too much. April deadline like 2017/2018 works better for the timeline, and people will be more motivated to submit. || June/July deadline is also not friendly to many US early career researchers (potential PCs) in academia since they may be working on the NSF CAREER deadline. || Even the June deadline is too close to the CHI deadline — why not May?

• Jessica: Listen, I get it. There will NEVER be a deadline or a review period that works for everyone. When we had a May deadline this year, GROUP ended up shifting their deadline later. There are too many conferences and too many holidays across the world to find a “perfect time.” But I want to stress two main points. First, let’s say a CSCW deadline is in September and you’re also submitting a paper to CHI. No one is saying you can’t work on those papers until XX weeks/months before the deadline. You should be submitting to the venue that makes the most sense, not the one with the next deadline. Second, and I know I sound like a broken record, but rolling deadlines are meant to address these comments. This means that if, for example, you’re working on a CAREER proposal, you can work on finalizing the CSCW paper after you submit the proposal. Or you work on the CSCW paper in the spring. It’s as easy as that. This is one of the benefits of rolling. Reviews will be spread out across the year based on when authors submit. You will likely be asked to review as many papers, but not all at the same time. At the same time, I want to stress that there is never a “convenient” time for us to have our paper review cycle. We will likely not have the same overlap again that we had this year.
• Guo: We acknowledge that we are a global community and want to support work-life balance. When we plan our review/submission timeline, we do take major holidays in various countries and cultures and potential overlaps with other conferences into account in hopes of accommodating any delay (such as being sick for two weeks or taking care of other personal emergencies). However, it is impossible to have a deadline or a review timeline that accommodates everyone and there will always be overlaps with something else — but we are trying to help people plan ahead.

Should we be pulling submitted papers from authors who submit highly irresponsible reviews?

• Guo: CSCW 2026 does have a policy on irresponsible reviews in the Call for Papers (https://cscw.acm.org/2026/papers.html). Example cases of highly irresponsible reviews include: reviews that violate CSCW 2026’s LLM policy, missing or one-sentence reviews, reviews not relevant to the paper or that miss a substantial portion of the paper. If the review is confirmed as “highly irresponsible,” the papers submitted by the reviewer will be desk rejected per discretion of the papers chairs. We might also report this incident and this reviewer to the ACM. We have enforced this in multiple cases this cycle.
• Amy: There tends to be a hesitation on “black listing” people or keeping any kinds of lists of who has behaved badly. But it makes me crazy that as a result we end up inviting someone who was an irresponsible reviewer to review again the following year. I don’t have ideas about a solution.

Should we actually enforce # of reviews per paper submission? || Recruiting reviewers is hard even though authors technically volunteer as a part of submission. Can we enforce this volunteer commitment, especially for senior authors?

• Xinru: The set of right reviewers for all submitted papers overlaps somewhat, but is not the same set, as authors of submitted papers. Some authors (e.g., who are new to the community, new to a research area, very junior) should not be reviewing as much or at all.
• Fab: in general, we have been saying for the past years that for each paper submitted, three reviews should be produced by the authors team. This is, from my point of view, fair: You get what you give, although this is more easily said than done — see the issue with irresponsible reviews above. In any case, we have not been able to enforce this, mainly due to insufficient support from the review system to match authors from papers invited to review and declining review. This has been contributing to overloading the reviewers who care for the community and have been carrying the burden: that is the reason why I think it is very important to find a way to enforce this. There is also the issue that not all authors from a submission would qualify as reviewers, as Xinru mentioned. Some of them may be very early in their career, making their first submission to CSCW, etc. We hope to be able to address this through the rolling process that we have been working on.

Can we bring back the reviewer mentorship program? This might help prepare our grad students to help productively with our reviewing burden.

• Jessica: Michael Muller did this for several years and it is something we would love to bring back. That said, this requires a fair amount of work, including someone willing to take the lead in organizing the matching, as well as enough senior people to act as mentors.
• Fab: Finding volunteers to run the process has actually been the problem here. In any case, if we would like to foster our community, this would be very important to bring back. Any interested people should get in touch with the steering committee to discuss the issue.

To facilitate review quality (and its specificity to the CSCW community), what do we think about training reviewers?

• Jessica: At some level, this is the responsibility of the student’s advisor, committee, and program. I also acknowledge not all students have supportive advisors/mentors to turn to. The reviewer mentorship program was very helpful in training students in the past, but this can only happen if enough senior folks take on the load of organizing.

Can we convince full professors and department chairs to recognize paper reviewing as important for tenure to address the reviewer crisis?

• Jessica: This is challenging and needs to happen at the university level, if we’re thinking of this counting toward promotion and tenure reviews. University policies vary and folks within individual departments need to lobby for having reviews “count” for more — and yes, this starts with senior faculty, so I’d suggest starting that conversation with a trusted mentor or at a faculty meeting. I also think making reviewer recognition more visible will help some.

I’ve seen that grad students have been ACs which 1) I don’t think is work we should put on them and 2) they are not yet qualified for the job. Can we not? || If Ph.D candidates are qualified enough to be the PCs, I want to volunteer!

• Jessica: At this time, the general consensus among chairs and organizers is that ACs need to have obtained their PhDs. We do this for multiple reasons: (1) knowledge of the space; (2) experience in managing the review process; (3) the amount of work/time; and (4) power dynamics between students and senior reviewers.
• Xinru: There are very few exceptions (because we did not have enough PCs, we had to make a few exceptions, e.g. a student who had served on the PC in the past and published multiple PACM HCI/CHI papers as lead author).
• Amy: This is one of the problems that rolling is hoping to solve. By raising the seniority of track leaders to full professor, we hope they will ask more senior people to be ACs and reviewers.
• Fab: In any case, there is a consensus that we need senior people taking on these roles. However, we cannot force anyone to volunteer, or can we? Maybe we should be thinking of having senior people in the community to commit to be part of the PC every other year, so that they qualify to submit to the conference.

You should be reviewing papers even if you do not have 100% overlap with method, theory, and topic. You should be reviewing “irrelevant” papers in your field. || A CSCW scholar with expertise in a method should be able to speak about the validity of the paper’s method in any social computing topic. || While it might be true that a CSCW scholar should be able to assess methodology in any topic, they might not volunteer when ending up with papers out of interest. || Division by method is one of my reasons not to volunteer, I know this leads me to review papers irrelevant for me.

• Guo: We agree. We are not asking people to review papers that 100% overlap with their method, theory, and topic. We are asking people to review papers they have sufficient knowledge about. For example, we’d like to avoid asking quantitative or system researchers to review qualitative papers, or vice versa.
• Jessica: I think it’s important for us as a community to stress to reviewers that (1) they do not need expertise in all aspects of the research (methods, topic, etc), but (2) it is helpful to acknowledge where their expertise lays — and aspects of the paper they may not be able to speak on. I am frequently a subject-matter expert but am not familiar with the method, so I state up front that my comments will be focused on the topic and I will defer to reviewers with methods expertise to assess the validity/rigor of that aspect of the paper.
• Amy: method is not the only criteria for selection as a reviewer for rolling. ACs for rolling will have at least a basic understanding of the method, and then can invite a variety of reviewers who cover different aspects of the paper. Not all the reviewers need to be experts in the method. But this will solve the problem of no one having knowledge of the method. As an Editor for 2024, there were SIX papers in my pile that got reviews saying “this is meaningless because it is qualitative.” There were multiple systems papers that got critiques of their evaluation saying it’s not a full study. But as systems people know, the contribution of a systems paper is the tech itself, and a “mini” evaluation is expected. We aim to make sure that papers are evaluated by a reasonable standard.

What’s the point of distributing papers to ACs by method instead of topic or paper bidding? This did not work well this year. || Why do we focus on papers based on methods, not on substantive areas? Does this lead to much focus on method rigor instead of what the paper is around?

• Guo: CSCW has had semi-subcommittees by method for several years. The reason is to ensure that we don’t ask quantitative or system researchers to review qualitative papers, or vice versa. However, we did use paper bidding. Both SPCs and PCs bid on all papers that match their method expertise, and they are assigned with papers that match their expertise in methods and research topics.
• Xinru: this is especially important to limit the number of papers each person bids on and increases the match and likelihood they will bid on all papers. Instead of bidding on 600+ papers, they bid on 100.
• Amy: see my answer to the question above.
• Fab: In my opinion, we are lacking clear guidelines regarding when someone should judge apt or not to review a paper — maybe because we take for granted that people must know that? From my prior experience as a Papers chair and Editor, it is not so uncommon that someone bids on a paper that they are interested in, but then come back with strong critique on the methodological approach, because it is not aligned with their own methodological background — see Amy’s comment above. Although the other reviewers can/should help towards a balance, I have seen situations where one dominant reviewer has made a big difference.

Can we have reviewer instructions that papers must be for a global audience? I.e., location in title + don’t assume everyone knows US history and legislation etc.

• Jessica: I support this request for inclusion in author instructions.
• Fab: agreed. But let’s remember that this should be valid to all authors. People in Europe, South America, Asia, etc. should not assume that everyone else knows their history and legislation.

Volunteering

How can we volunteer to SPC or PC? || How can we volunteer for building the new system for rolling?

• Jessica: For rolling, Eric Gilbert and Amy Bruckman have set up a Google Form to apply to be on the SPC/PC. You can access it through their Medium here: https://medium.com/acm-cscw/cscw-rolling-submissions-925e17bb4022

We keep hearing that we need to volunteer. But what is going on is so unclear and seems so disorganized, that it is hard to know what you’re stepping up for.

• Guo: As outlined at the town hall, we introduced several changes, such as Senior Program Committee (SPC), Program Committee (PC), and PC meetings, to the May 2025 cycle in hopes of mitigating those severe issues CSCW has faced in the past several years (e.g., AI reviews, reviewer crisis). We acknowledge that since this is the first time we introduced these changes, there are many moving parts. We are doing our best to make this process as transparent as we can and give people as detailed and updated guidelines as we can. We expect that this process will be smoother and improved when we run the Spring/Summer 2026 cycle if we can have a sufficient number of SPCs/PCs in place beforehand. One reason why some may see this current process as unclear is that we spent quite a lot of time recruiting enough volunteers. Without enough volunteers in place, we couldn’t finalize the procedures and details of the review process.
• Amy: I think another thing we can improve is making sure people know how much work they are volunteering for, and make sure no job is onerously time consuming.
• Fab: it is my hope that those things will be clearer when we are done with the details of the rolling process. My impression is that we have been doing so many changes for the past few years, mainly trying to extinguish some urgent fires, and have not been planning properly. As a result, things implemented in one year have been changed in the other year, bringing a lot of instability to the community. That is also the reason why we are moving slow with the definition of the rolling process. We have been thinking of the many moving parts, of potential outcomes in particular scenarios so that we get to a process that will stay in place for at least 3 years. Hopefully longer.

Deadline

It is very very very very worth making a July deadline happen. Our community needs venues for our scholarship, CHI 26 can’t be it (too crowded and AI-filled).

• Jessica: I think most people would agree. Please consider signing up for the PC/SPC.
• Amy: A June deadline is now planned!

When CSCW had only one deadline back in 2017, it worked much better and was less confusing in many ways. Why don’t we go back to a model that was proven to be working?

• Jessica: I agree that one deadline was less confusing, but I’m not sure it worked “better.” If I know I can’t submit again for another year, this may lead to me (and/or my students) creating problematic working environments and submitting under-developed research studies. This is not helpful to the community, and honestly can be a waste of reviewers’ time. The review process is not set up to provide written feedback on papers that have no chance of being accepted in their current state. Instead, I strongly encourage folks to do internal peer reviews within their labs, departments, or regions. I am happy to share how I have managed this process at UMD for CHI and CSCW deadlines for the last ~10 years. Back in 2017/2018, we went from one deadline to four. After a few years, this was unsustainable so we went to two deadlines. At this time, two deadlines (as they are currently structured) are also unsustainable. This is a huge part of the motivation for the shift to rolling deadlines, where papers will be submitted when they are ready, not because of an arbitrary deadline. And while I am certainly one of those people who works much better with a looming deadline, I have also witnessed students being mistreated and having to work in unhealthy ways in order to make a deadline, and that is not something I want to be a norm in our community.
• Amy: The one deadline model is an artifact of needing to print physical proceedings. When we — the steering committee — decided to change that in 2017, the goal was to move to rolling. However, we realized that moving to rolling would involve abandoning PCS–the software can’t handle it. So we chickened out. I regret the decision. If I had to do it over again (I was steering committee chair then), I would have said, “OK let’s stick with the current model for next year but form a committee to find software to move to true rolling.” That is what we are doing now.

Last year we discussed the possibility of trying the NLP venue model, e.g. still several deadlines but reviews can be multiple cycles. Will that work for CSCW?

• Jessica: This is basically what we are trying to shift to with rolling. While there will technically not be any deadlines, anyone can set their personal deadline for submitting (e.g., this needs to be submitted before the end of the semester).

To clarify, there’s a regular and rolling submission deadline in Jan 2027? And we pick which we submit to?

• Amy: We are hoping to have rolling fully open by 1/27.

CSCW 2027 outlines early vs late 2026 “target dates” depending on different tracks. How is it a rolling deadline model if there are track-based timelines? || To clarify — the rolling will begin technically right now, but there won’t be a review cycle until January 2027?

• Amy: I haven’t read that document, and that seems not accurate to me. We are hoping to slowly start accepting papers for rolling review in 2026, and be fully open in 2027.

What is the timeline to publication with the new rolling deadline model?

• Amy: We are hoping for four months from submission to review process complete, but it of course depends on the number of rounds of review.

For rolling, what’s the accepted cutoff date to get on the conference program? Presumably not the week before?

• Amy: No cutoff. We don’t know how many rounds of review a paper will go through, so can’t predict when your review will be complete. You will be invited to present at the next conference after acceptance. If you don’t like the location, you don’t have to present.

Is the Jan 2027 paper deadline plan a back-up in case rolling is not ready to go full volume at that point? Or is the plan to run in parallel as a transition?

• Amy: Yes, that’s right. We hope 1/27 is the last traditional deadline and then rolling will be the way we do it. But it could all not work — this is an experiment.

Having a rolling deadlines based on the methods it is still a deadline for people working with a specific method (not better work life balance).

• Amy: Rolling has no deadlines.

An advantage of a conference cycle is that reviews are due on a known date so people take the deadlines (somewhat) seriously. Not always true for journal review.

• Jessica: First, I think lots of conference reviewers don’t take the deadline seriously, given the large uptick in reviewers — and ACs! — ghosting us in recent years. I think this is most easily addressed by stressing that timely reviewing is a core value of our community and setting this expectation among authors and reviewers that we are committing to a task that needs to be done in a timely manner to keep the process working.
• Fab: It will take commitment and cultural development in our community, so that people stick with the review time frames associated with a submission. The rolling deadline is not working from the assumption that reviewers will be assigned and they will submit their reviews when they like. We have been carefully thinking of a process to follow up on review assignments, replace unresponsive reviewers, have consequences for irresponsible reviewers, etc.

PACM / Manuscript Central / Publishing

I haven’t seen a conference use Manuscript Central. How hard is that as an SPC / AC? For example, sifting through reviewers is already hard enough on PCS. || Multiple journals are moving away from Manuscript Central because it’s terrible. Why do it now? || I was part of compass’s journal shift and I’m a huge fan; review workloads are spread, work gets better. Mc though, was awful. Is there a long term plan? || OpenReview is extremely good for holding onto past reviews. ACL Rolling Review uses it, and I’ve never heard any complaints. || Why do we need to build off of manuscript central, why not continue using PCS? Or even HotCRP? || As a mc hater, hotcrp is open source and acm has licenses for hosted instances as well. We (computer science) broadly need a better platform and can build it

• Amy: A committee evaluated multiple options and landed on MC as the lesser of evils. Software like PCS, openreview and hotcrp can’t handle true rolling–they expect things to be batched. If you want to write something better and maintain it indefinitely, we’re all ears.
• Fab: it is important to notice that there will be a redefinition of roles. I have the impression that people are forgetting this! There is no way to keep doing things the same way we were doing before if we are fully implementing a rolling submission journal model. We will not be talking about SPC or PCs anymore. There will be EiCs, AEs, Editorial Board and additional reviewers. We will not have PC meetings — although we might want to think of a meeting culture that would work in the new model — e.g., editorial board meeting. But those things should be tailored to the new process!

Have you all considered using a ticketing system to manage all the rolling papers’ different deadlines? These have default deadlines and reminders built in.

• Jessica: This is the case in Manuscript Central. You can set up reminders to go to prospective reviewers to respond to the request and to reviewers regarding the review deadline.

For rolling — what recourse/options will authors have if there is a mismatch between the AE and author? (E.g., paper gets caught up in endless revisions)

• Jessica: Amy addressed this at town hall but the short answer is that there is enough structure built into the process (e.g., Editors, senior PC) that this is unlikely to happen. I think we will also be paying attention to how the process unfolds with early submissions and adjust as needed. On a personal note, as a long-time submitter to journals, I have reached out to the editor of journals directly with concerns in this vein. Sometimes an editor will intervene, and sometimes you should pull your submission and submit elsewhere if it seems like the reviewers/AE will not be satisfied.
• Amy: If things go south, you may reach out to your track Editor or the EiCs. Like with any journal.

Communication

You’re using Medium a lot for communicating important information. Is there not a better platform ?

• Jessica: For 2025, we posted things to the CSCW Medium, to the CSCW Meta group and CSCW page on Facebook, to LinkedIn, to Bluesky, and to Mastodon. We also send emails to the two CSCW mailing lists (although as I note below, I don’t think these lists include many people). We also shared information on the CSCW website and through emails sent directly to authors through PCS or via emails authors/presenters provided when completing forms related to presentations.
• Amy: Theia Henderson and David Karger at MIT are building us a platform-free, open source alternative in Theia’s Grafitti software.

Why don’t we use a federated instance of a social media platform for communications and gathering opinions, instead of proprietary systems like Facebook? || For the rolling pioneer, if you want to be fair you need to post not only on Facebook.

• Jessica: We do! We post on Mastodon and Bluesky. Mastodon gets virtually no engagement, and Bluesky has been steadily growing over the last year since we officially left Twitter and moved to Bluesky. Our Bluesky account currently has 1250+ followers.
• Amy: Theia Henderson and David Karger at MIT are building us a platform-free, open source alternative in Theia’s Grafitti software.

Would some kind of traditional mailing list help?

• Sue: In asking around at the conference this was everybody I talked to’s preferred way forward for communication within the community.
• Jessica: There is one that’s been around for a long time but it’s not clear who is on it. What is clear is that most people are not on it. We could try adding all authors from recent years to a mailing list but we also don’t want to spam people. Regardless, we’ll look into this!
• Fab: The 2 CSCW dedicated lists that I have known and used for years now are CSCW-SIG (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=cscw-sig) — around 250 members — and CSCW-ALL (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=cscw-all) — around 650 members. I sometimes refer to CHI-ANNOUNCEMENTS, as many people in our community are also there as well. Other lists I have used to reach out people working with CSCW is the EUSSET distribution list (https://www.listserv.dfn.de/sympa/subscribe/eusset) — most of the European colleagues would be in that list — and the British HCI list (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=bcs-hci) — same rationale as for CHI-ANNOUNCEMENTS.

Other

What is the relationship between ACM and EUSSET?

Fab: ACM and EUSSET are both organisations supporting computing communities. EUSSET, the European Society for Socially-Embedded Systems, has been founded to foster the international practice-centred computing research community. The organisation was established in 2010 and, although it is based in Europe and refers to a strong European tradition of research, it is actually an international community congregating members from all around the world. In EUSSET, Europe is understood more as a conceptual rather than a geographical notion — see manifesto at https://www.eusset.eu/about-eusset/manifesto-2021/ and position paper at https://www.eusset.eu/membership/position-paper/. As ACM, EUSSET is behind a series of conferences relevant for people doing practice-centred computing research, in special CSCW researchers. Its flagship conference is the EUSSET CSCW (ECSCW) conference, which is known as an international venue on practice-centred computing and the design of cooperation technologies. The conference was established in 1989 and has published many influential studies in the field. Many people who publish in CSCW also publish in ECSCW and the other way around.

Should CSCW allow papers that involve collaboration between one human and AI agents, rather than just between 2+ humans?

• Jessica: This is a topic the steering and executive committees are thinking about. No answers now but they will keep the community updated. For now, the scope statement included in the call for papers is the best place to find guidance on this topic.

Are hybrid CSCW conferences continuing into the future? Travel budgets are shrinking and accessibility is an issue.

• Jessica: This is determined by future chairs. As of now, we think the online pre-conference went very well, with more than 70 papers presented virtually and very engaging panel discussions. For virtual attendance to the main conference, this is increasingly cost prohibitive, especially when a very small number of people are attending sessions remotely. We chose to only stream the main room in 2025 because of costs and because in 2024, most sessions had zero remote attendees (or just those presenting remotely). Beyond that, the cost is incredibly high, as is the likelihood of technical issues arising.
• Guo: For CSCW 2026, we also plan to do an online pre-conference day following CSCW 2025’s successful example. Based on statistics from CSCW conferences in the last several years, the pattern is consistent: the cost to have virtual attendance at the main conference was extremely high; most sessions had almost zero remote attendees; and remote attendees often considered their conference experience very low-quality. Unfortunately, this model is not sustainable for anyone. Therefore, we may consider the model of a virtual pre-conference day with paper presentations, a panel, and even a virtual keynote + in-person main conference.

Would you all consider writing a paper about this process, since it’s relevant to CSCW? || Will there be a retrospective report on this review circle and conference ?

• Jessica: Yes! I will be doing this after a short break to recover from CSCW 2025. :)

How can we support international and independent scholars in attending when there is uncertainty around conference location and publication cycle?

Guo: Location wise, we do try to share the conference location as soon as we can so international and independent scholars can prepare and plan in advance if they have concerns about traveling. For example, we announced the approximate location and time of CSCW 2026 very early (before the 2025 May submission deadline) on the CSCW 2025 website to help people prepare and plan: “CSCW 2026 will be held in the USA in October 2026. We will share the exact location and date as soon as possible.” Likewise, we try to be as transparent as we can about publication cycles so people can decide if they want to submit based on the location. In the CSCW 2026 Call for Papers, we made it clear that the May 2025 submission deadline was the only cycle for CSCW 2026. SIGCHI also provides resources such as the Gary Marsden Travel Awards (GMTA).

Can we start putting reviewing awards in the program? Right now they’re hidden in PCS but highlighting and promoting good reviews may start shifting the norm.

• Jessica: I support this idea! People should also list this in their CVs if they don’t already. Note: if you go to PCS, then click on Reviews, then click on “See Reviewing History,” you can see if any of your PCS reviewers have been recognized as an outstanding review.