[Call for Participation] CSCW 2026 Workshop: What's Next for Infrastructure and Collaborative Ecologies? (deadline 07/20)

Dear Colleagues,
We invite you to consider submitting position papers to the upcoming CSCW 2026 Workshop entitled:
Research and Design for Sociotechnical Systems: What's Next for Infrastructure and Collaborative Ecologies?
Workshop website: https://cscw2026-infrastructure-workshop.github.io/
We seek to bring together an eclectic group of scholars and practitioners who approach infrastructure from different disciplinary or professional backgrounds and positionalities. This includes — but is not limited to — researchers working in CSCW, HCI, information science, STS, software studies, data science, and team science, as well as practitioners actively building and maintaining infrastructure (metascience entrepreneurs, Fediverse and AT Protocol builders, open-source maintainers, data stewards, AI/ML compute infrastructure maintainers, and others).
If you are interested in what it means to research, design, or develop both within and for collaborative sociotechnical ecologies, see below for key dates and potential prompts. For the full framing, visit the Background page: https://cscw2026-infrastructure-workshop.github.io/background
We'd love to hear from you!
Best, Erin Robinson
On behalf of the workshop organizers: Joel Chan, James Herbsleb, Charlotte Lee, Irene Pasquetto, Ronen Tamari, and Anissa Tanweer
----- KEY DATES -----
Position paper submission deadline: July 20, 2026 (11:59 pm Anywhere on Earth)
Notification: August 17, 2026
Workshop date: October 11, 2026 (one day, in-person at CSCW 2026)
----- POTENTIAL PROMPTS -----
Your position paper might respond to one or more of the following:

  1.
How have you attempted to build resources for data-intensive knowledge work that satisfy specific use cases that are also applicable to a broader range of application areas?

  2.
How and for what specific purposes (practical and/or theoretical) have you developed or applied concepts or theories to deepen understanding about how infrastructures are constructed, maintained, or dismantled?

  3.
How do you identify and account for asymmetries of power among stakeholders in pre-infrastructural settings? What forms of negotiation, mediation, resistance, or accommodation emerge in your work?

  4.
What sociotechnical conditions (e.g., governance structures, trust relationships, maintenance culture, interoperability standards, funding, communication routines) constitute a sufficiently developed collaborative ecology for infrastructural interventions to become viable? To what extent can infrastructures actively produce the collaborative ecologies they require, rather than leaning on pre-existing alignments?

  5.
Do you have a development or implementation experience to report on that can help us think through the challenges, opportunities, and methods of bridging local concerns/practices with infrastructural ambitions?

  6.
Have you observed that AI infrastructures such as large language models and data centers require new kinds of collaborative ecologies? Have you identified new research methods and challenges while investigating AI infrastructures?

  7.
Has your research touched on political, economic, or ethical issues of infrastructuring? How do collaborative ecologies address these types of issues?



============================
Erin Robinson, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
CEO, Metadata Game Changers, LLC
Visiting Scholar, Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder
Indigenous Law Lab Fellow, NYU
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9998-0114



    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    To unsubscribe from CHI-ANNOUNCEMENTS send an email to:
     mailto:[email protected]

    To manage your SIGCHI Mailing lists or read our polices see:
     https://sigchi.org/operations/listserv/
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------