We are pleased to invite submissions to the CSCW 2018 workshop on Social Issues in Personal Informatics: Design, Data, and Infrastructure, to be held in Jersey City, NJ, USA on November 4, 2018.

Important Dates

• Early-notification application deadline: 1 September 2018 (11:59pm PDT)
• Early-notification decisions sent to authors: 10 September 2018
• CSCW early-bird registration: 17 September 2018
• Late-notification application deadline:  24 September 2018 (11:59pm PDT)
• Late-notification decisions sent to authors: 1 October 2018
• Final (“camera-ready”) versions of accepted authors’ position papers due and posted to the workshop website: 22 October 2018
• Workshop: Sunday, 4 November 2018

Workshop Focus and Goals

An abundance of digital tools exist for tracking various aspects of one’s life, body, health, and activities. These personal informatics (PI) and quantified self (QS) technologies are designed to help users capture, reflect on, and get actionable information about personal data. In the past (and still in many cases), the design of such systems emphasized an individual-centric vantage point that focused on supporting an individual’s self-tracking, self-knowledge, and self-management activities. Over time, however, a growing number of PI researchers are recognizing that such practices are socially motivated, collaboratively conducted, and embedded in interpersonal contexts, in ways that extend well beyond single-user use cases and requirements. This is resulting in the appearance of a host of new theories, methods, and frameworks for understanding social contexts and practices within PI literature and design spaces.

This one-day workshop will bring together researchers interested in better understanding and designing for PI at its intersection with social computing. Activities will provide participants with opportunities to share insights, exchange approaches, foster collaborations, and strengthen our connections. We are seeking participants with diverse perspectives, who work with and in a variety of methods and application areas; who are from academia, industry, startups, nonprofits, and government affiliations; and who represent a range of seniority levels from junior to more experienced researchers.

Submissions

We request interested attendees to submit a 2-page position paper (excluding references, no formatting requirements) that overviews the relevance of their work and/or interests to the goals of the workshop. From submissions, organizers will invite up to three attendees to deliver a short (approximately 5–8 min), provocative talk designed to provide a micro-lesson on a topic relevant to workshop themes around social aspects of personal data. Submissions should note whether the applicant would be interested in being considered for one of these short presentations. Papers should be in PDF format and not anonymized. Submissions can be made by emailing the workshop organizers at socialpi@lists.colorado.edu.

We encourage submissions on topics including but not limited to:

• Data representation and presentation
• Role of computational models of social relationships and behaviors
• Infrastructure and architectures that support social engagement
• Collective use of data
• Understanding collective sensemaking
• Supporting communication, empathy, and collaborative decision-making
• Understanding stakeholders, motivations, and risks
• Ethical and privacy issues
• Requirements for specific subdomains (i.e., mental health, fitness, chronic illness, addiction management, client management, business intelligence, etc.)

The organizers will review each submission for relevance, originality, benefits that attendance will offer to the applicant, and the potential for the applicant’s involvement to provoke generative, interdisciplinary interactions among workshop participants. Rather than technical submissions or reports on specific experimental findings, we are more interested in thought pieces, case studies, and speculative research visions that will prompt questions and discussions and generally expand our ways of thinking about the future for work in the space of collective informatics.