The CSCW2020 in Clowdr Experience
CSCW2020 is taking place virtually in Clowdr. Read on to learn more about the platform and the opportunities to engage with the community over the next week!
Your CSCW 2020 Virtual Program Co-Chairs,
Drew Paine, Carolina Fuentes, Tesh Goyal
The Clowdr Platform: Supporting & contributing to an open source, community-driven platform
Evaluating many options, the organizing committee selected the Clowdr platform for our conference hub to best address the three core values mentioned in our other post about going virtual. Clowdr is an open source platform designed and built by academic conference organizers, and since March has been used for a variety of virtual events. The organizing committee elected to take advantage of this opportunity to influence the direction of Clowdr, with the aim of helping advance a resource communities can leverage going forward. Unlike many commercial platforms, the cost to run Clowdr is minimal, which has helped keep registration costs low. Our Technical program will be presented in Zoom webinars linked directly from the Clowdr program. Each of these meetings will be managed by professionals to simplify the attendee experience and ensure we are all able to reliably learn from our peers exciting research.
As a community, we are well equipped to provide feedback that can influence the short and long-term design of Clowdr. We encourage attendees to provide feedback through the survey linked on the Clowdr homepage. The post-conference survey will also ask for your thoughts. The Virtual Program & Meta Co-Chairs will synthesize these anonymous insights and share them with Clowdr and the community.
If you do encounter any issues with any part of our virtual platform, please contact us in the Clowdr Tech Support chat channel or via the help desk email provided in your Clowdr registration email.
Participating in technical sessions & socializing with fellow attendees
The Clowdr platform provides a one-stop virtual environment for exploring our many events and socializing with attendees from around the world. While we can’t be together in person, it is possible to chat with other attendees in text or through video breakout rooms at any time. In addition, the CSCW2020 Social Chairs have developed a variety of activities to connect participants from around the world through less formal sessions. We suggest that once you have completed the Clowdr registration process, give their virtual treasure hunt a try and learn more about Clowdr’s features.
Every program item has a dedicated text chat channel that persists for the life of the conference, allowing authors and attendees to sustain conversations across days and importantly timezones. Pre-recorded presentations are available in case you are unable to join the live session. For those attending live, we highly recommend that you follow individual items to have quick and easy access to events from the Clowdr Program menu at the bottom left.
How are CSCW & UIST co-located?
For the first time CSCW and UIST are co-located with an overlapping program on Wednesday October 21st. The day begins with a joint social event before an exciting panel celebrating the intersection of collaborative and social computing with systems research. We’ll close out the day (and conference) with a joint keynote speaker before concluding CSCW2020.
Throughout this final conference day, CSCW attendees will have the opportunity to view UIST paper sessions. Just look for the UIST Papers track in Clowdr to find these events, and join the appropriate Zoom room at the appropriate time. Unfortunately Q&A for UIST events is not available through the CSCW platform. If you are interested in more fully participating in UIST events make sure to request access to their virtual platform. The Clowdr homepage has more information on this process.
