CSCW community:
CSCW Community Members:

The CSCW Steering Committee met this week to decide how to move forward with CSCW 2017 given the situation with the Zika virus in Brazil. We have decided unanimously that we will relocate CSCW 2017 to the US and that it will remain on the same schedule as previously planned (e.g. Feb/March 2017). As you can imagine, this was a difficult decision and we didn't make it lightly.

In the end, we decided that we could not, in good conscience, move forward with hosting CSCW in Brazil given the health concerns, anticipated impact on attendance and, in particular, the case that the health risk is greater for some members of our community than others (e.g. young women and men).

We want to acknowledge and thank the CSCW 2017 Conference Chairs and the Brazilian CSCW community for all of the effort they have invested in planning for CSCW 2017. We deeply appreciate it and regret that we can’t move forward with CSCW 2017 in Brazil. We still consider building connections with the Latin American CSCW community a priority and are enthusiastic about having CSCW in Brazil at a future date. We will also be working with the Latin American CSCW community on identifying ways to continue to engage the community and will be exploring opportunities to apply for SIGCHI development funds to help with this.

We also want to thank the CSCW community, more generally, for your thoughtful and balanced contributions to these discussions. It was extremely helpful in guiding our data collection and decision making.

Over the last week or so, the Steering Committee has been working with the Conference Chairs, the Program Chairs, the ECSCW Leadership, the ACM, and others on collecting more information so that we could ensure that any decision we made could be implemented successfully. We explored ways of mitigating the risks of remaining in Brazil by, for example, as several member of the community suggested, supporting more virtual attendance, but we just couldn’t be confident that the infrastructure would support this. As a result, we decided to move outside of Brazil.

Based on our discussions with various parties, it became clear that keeping the same conference and submission timeframe would make it possible to leverage a lot of the work that has already been done by the conference committee, including the program chairs, and avoid conflicts with ECSCW. We also learned that many in the community are preparing submissions based on this timeframe, so keeping it the same makes it easier for many, particularly students.

It also became clear, given the compressed timeframe and existing ACM relationships, that hosting CSCW in the US would be the most viable option. As a result, we decided not to consider Chile or other locations outside the US for CSCW 2017. At our request, the ACM has begun gathering bids from venues in several US cities We expect to be able to announce the location in the next 4-6 weeks.

We are thrilled to announce that Steve Poltrock has agreed to remain as a CSCW 2017 Conference Co-Chair, which will help tremendously with continuity. Steve, and perhaps members of the Steering Committee, will be reaching out over the next month or so asking members of the community to help with CSCW 2017. We understand that many of you will  already have made commitments that make it difficult for you to take on a leadership position in CSCW 2017, but we hope that you will, under these unusual conditions, consider helping. Assembling a conference committee quickly is essential to the success of CSCW 2017.

Again, we greatly appreciate the sensitivity of the CSCW community in addressing these complex issues and in your patience as we work through the process. We all recognize that we’re trying to make the best of a difficult situation and there may be some bumps ahead, but are confident that we can have a very successful CSCW 2017.



Pamela Hinds phinds@stanford.edu
Cliff Lampe cacl@umich.edu
Daniel Avrahami daniel@fxpal.com
Geraldine Fitzpatrick geraldine.fitzpatrick@tuwein.ac.at
R. Stuart Geiger sgeiger@gmail.com
Loren Terveen terveen@cs.umn.edu
Hao-Chuan Wang haochuan@cs.nthu.edu.tw