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2020 Fall CSCW virtual conference report

By Ruoxi (Anna) Shang, PhD student in HCDE 

This is my second time attending a virtual conference and my first CSCW experience. Unlike in-person conferences, where I need to make plans for traveling weeks prior to the event, I didn’t get a sense of the event happening until the moment I clicked into the first session. While overwhelming at first with so many intriguing topics, I was able to navigate through them and focused on papers around online communities and system design. 

There were both down sides and up sides of networking through virtual attendance. As a novice in the field and also first-time attendee, I found it less intimidating to make comments and ask questions since the pressure coming from physical appearances and in-person impressions isn’t a factor anymore. On the flip side, it’s a bit more uneasy to introduce myself through small talk and casual conversation. I really like the feature that live videos are recorded. This makes the content more structured and available, especially with early morning sessions due to time-zone differences. However, attending the event live would be much more enriching for many, yet the early morning sessions are exhausting to spin around. For future virtual events, it might be helpful to expand the duration of the entire conference to accommodate more time zones. The technical support wasn’t super helpful either. Some features (e.g. links to videos and pdfs) didn’t show up in my browser at first, and I had to resolve many technical issues on my own. That alone makes the virtual experience not accessible for many people. 

Overall, I spent a great immersive time learning and networking at my first CSCW conference, and I look forward to attending it again next year.