One (more) reason to go to China!

The 23rd ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is held this year in Hangzhou, China from March 19-23. As the title suggests, the conference is presenting views to the latest research in the design and use of groupware. Around 200 researchers will be presenting their work. Keynote speakers are CEO Jack Ma from Alibaba Group (Chinese cluster of Internet services) and Genevieve Bell from Intel Labs. The co-chairs are from Stanford University (Pamela Hinds), Microsoft Research (John C. Tang) and Alibaba Group (Jian Wang).

Glancing the topics of the conference will hint us where the interests are in this field. What makes these kind of like gatherings particularly interesting is their overwhelming multiculturalism: They enforce you to take a broader view on the design of groupware. For example, what features would a CSCW tool need to support working across different timezones (Tang & al., Your Time Zone or Mine? A Study of Globally Time Zone-Shifted Collaboration)? What sort of issues need to be considered when the group is multi-cultural (Alsheikh & al. (Whose) Value-Sensitive Design? A Study of Long-Distance Relationships in an Arabic Cultural Context)? How does socio-economic background effect on the use of groupware and technology in overall (Ames & al. Understanding Technology Choices and Values through Social Class)?

The broad and long enlistment of research topics and the presence of corporate big shots tells that the future of CSCW looks big and busy. It is highly visible already, that companies and work communities are distributed across the globe: I believe that in the future many of us are using these type of tools, whether we like it or not.