Author Description

Welcome to the 21st ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). CSCW has always been an exciting, dynamic and welcoming research community, bridging between the social and the technological. If anything, it seems like the role of this community in society at large has become even more critical in recent years, as made even more salient by the timing of this year's event, overlapping with the United States midterm elections. We hope that our community is amongst the best-placed to understand the impact of technology on society, and design technologies that contribute in positive and meaningful ways. This conference marks a cycle of change and transition for CSCW. We moved to a fall schedule, along with journal-based publishing with PACM. We had two submission cycles to bridge the year-and-a-half gap from CSCW 2017, with papers from our first call published "Online First". This change resulted in a record number of papers accepted for presentation in this year's event: 295, including six papers from our affiliated journals. We appreciate the huge effort of all committee volunteers to process these papers over the two cycles. If you see one of them, please say thanks: they make this conference happen. We also experimented with other new ideas: some more successful, such as online PC meetings for both Online First and Second Cycle, saving resources and allowing for a more diverse participation, and some less successful, like making a public review summary available for accepted publications.