The trip report is a bit of a lost art, but I did want to capture a few things I liked at CSCW and share them with folks around me. It’s roughly chronological and focuses on sessions, and is only one of many paths through the conference (I wish I’d had about 3 of me; there were a lot of things I’d like to have seen); hopefully other folks will talk about their own paths in other spaces.

Both plenaries were big fun: good topics, engaging speakers.  Ron Burt had a new wrinkle around the idea of bridging ties in networks, calling out the importance of how the network is built. In particular, bridging ties that come from being embedded in a specific community for a while appear to be most valuable: the most successful performers oscillate between tight, local clusters within communities (in which trust is built and shit gets done) and broad connections across communities. It was a nice layer of nuance on the strong ties/weak ties story. Moira Burke and Bob Kraut’s paper analyzing the effect of strong and weak ties in Facebook added another, finding that talking with strong ties adds social support but also social stress — and was a better predictor of finding work than talking to weak ties.

Ron also talked about the value of encountering information outside your normal circles, so I took that at face value and went to the Gesture and Touch session.  Richard Harper and Helena Mentis gave a fun talk about how the gross, exaggerated motions that sometimes are needed to connect with Kinect led people to a playful, “carnival” attitude. I also liked Svetlana Yarosh, et al.’s paper about  ShareTable, designed for parent-child communication across divorced households; they were sensitive both to the issues of divorced families and the insight that families need to do things together at least as much as talk together. And all four were nice, effective talks–in general, the talks I saw at CSCW were good, better than average for conference talks I’ve seen.

The filter bubble panel was fine, though it was so focused on political discourse, and particularly the U.S. conservative/liberal split, that I wondered how generalizable the stories would be to other contexts and information domains. There was some useful theoretical grounding that hopefully helps with that, but I did wish the discussion had been broader. I also really wish I’d seen the Making the World a Better Place session, but I wound up spending that helping set up the demos session instead.

Tuesday I was more in my own space, and, as Ron Burt would predict, I got less stunningly new information, though it was still fun. At the “Practices in Social Networks” session I had high curiosity for the Manya Sleeper, et al. talk about self-censorship in Facebook because of Xuan Zhao’s work around self-curation in Timeline. It sounded like they were trying to figure out how much good something like Google+ circles would do if they were zero-cost, and I do think the idea of thinking hard about audience in social media is going to be important. It was a tale of two halves: the question of self-censorship focused on the types of information while the question of making it more share-able felt more focused on audiences, and there wasn’t as much connection as I’d hoped between the two.  Maybe in the paper. Then Eric Gilbert presented the shortest paper in CSCW, on underprovision of attention to new submissions in Reddit.  It was great to see someone studying Reddit (Pinterest is also ripe for colonization), and his method of counting multiply-submitted items where the n>1’th submission made it to the front page (with the implication that the earlier submissions had been ignored) was clever. The Cliff Lampe, et al. paper (presented by Jessica Vitak) also did a nice job of pointing out that use is not binary, and of looking at folks who are not college students using Facebook, so kudos there as well.

We had a couple of papers in the “Not Lost in Translation” session so I spent some time there.  Mary and Hao-Chuan did a nice job overall; practice talks paid off handsomely in both cases. Hao-Chuan’s observed that bilingual speakers allow us to design asymmetrical systems that selectively apply machine translation (think Chinese native-English second language speakers generating turns in Chinese that are translated for an English-only partner, but getting the English statements from their partner un-translated), allowing us to leverage the bilingual abilities for better outcomes. The idea that cultural difference should be a resource rather than a barrier is often raised, and this is one example of how to do it. I also liked Naomi Yamashita, et al.’s discussion of transmission lag in second language contexts. Usually CSCW systems stamp out lag wherever it’s found, but here in small doses it improved group outcomes. In large doses, it led to interaction chaos among native speakers who wound up talking over each other unawares, but the idea of lag as a resource was also cool.

Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker’s talk about how different ways to measure participation in Wikipedia leads to different results was fun as well: great talk and cool point. The high-level idea was to look at time spent on Wikipedia and measure in labor hours, rather than edit counts. The argument was that labor hours was a more natural way to think of work outputs; a little Marxist, but interesting. This has all the problems around estimating session times that weblog analysis has, and doesn’t account well for tool efficiencies (think using Huggle to revert vandals and add warnings versus doing it by hand), but it was stimulating and they were thoughtful.

In the Controversy, Arguments, Rule Breakers, and Politics session, the R. Kelly Garrett and Brian Weeks paper about real-time corrections to political misinformation online was relevant to some of our work around coaching commenters in a discussion forum to be better posters–you have to give information in ways that don’t trigger defensive reactions (“Ego Threat”, they called it). Likewise the, Ben Towne, et al. paper that studied how seeing controversy and deliberation around an artifact would affect people’s perceptions of artifact quality looked fun. In general, it lowers it, though I wondered if folks more  embedded in the community norms would be more comfortable seeing the disagreements. At this point I kind of ran out of gas so I took off. I probably should have done this earlier; you should spend at least a little bit of your time getting out of dodge to talk to people, experience the location, have fun, and stay sane, but there were so many cool papers that I really wanted to try to stick with them.

On Wednesday, the Future of Crowd Work paper by Niki Kittur, et al. was intriguing: what would it take for crowd work to be something you’d be happy for your kid to grow up doing? They were proposing a move away from a faceless, fluid assembly line of repetitive tasks toward a way of organizing crowd work that would support advancement, dignity, and fairness for workers while broadening the kinds of work that might be done. They had a near-infinite supply of questions, and the 17-page paper is probably worth a read. My main question was that it still felt like a two-tier system: researchers and organizations would create tasks for the workers. I don’t think that’s how they meant it, but it would be useful to avoid an “us and them” mentality.

As an alum, I also had to go see the Most Cited CSCW paper session about the original GroupLens work. It was fun, and slightly campy, and interesting to see what they thought they got right and got wrong. It’s always amazed me how that first trio of papers from MIT, Bell, and GroupLens anticipated so many of the issues that would arrive later (and a little sad that so much of the followup work addressed only algorithmic accuracy). I also saw last year’s CSCW talk where Leysia Palen and Beki Grinter talked about their 10-year old paper about instant messaging in teen life, and I think there’s real value in this kind of look back.

Finally, at the closing plenary, Jascha Franklin-Hodge’s talk about the relentless (but somewhat disorganized and decentralized) use of A/B testing and data mining in political campaign messaging, and the value of serious thinking about user interfaces that make participation easier, also resonated well. He was thoughtful about the tension between getting the job done and generalizing results, and you could imagine interesting collaborations between academic researchers and political campaigns that could lead to insights around motivating participation. Studying the digital side of the campaign would be a fantastic ethnographic opportunity, too. My main question is that it’s not clear that good UI design should determine who gets elected 🙂 — but it was a nice way to close the conference.

So, that’s it. Left out are all the hallway conversations, the reconnecting with old friends, the meeting of new (lots of chats with grad students this time around, which was fun), the deliciously kitschy Buckhorn banquet, and all the other things that make the conference both intellectually and interpersonally stimulating. Overall, great conference and kudos to all the folks who put it together.