Research and Design for Sociotechnical Systems: What's Next for Infrastructure and Collaborative Ecologies?

A workshop at CSCW 2026.

We are living in a period of infrastructural upheaval. Scholarly communication infrastructures are straining under the combined weight of a labor crisis and a wave of AI slop; open source projects are threatened by a surge of low-quality AI contributions, funding crises, and emerging cybersecurity risks; and the social media and news landscape continues to fracture. What infrastructures will replace what is currently being broken? And how can designers and scholars take on an active role in the design of future infrastructures when most of us mainly work on the small scale?

This workshop seeks to bring together like-minded scholars and practitioners who are already taking on, or are deeply interested in, what it means to research, design, or develop both within and for the collaborative sociotechnical ecologies required to create and maintain multi-sited, networked infrastructural systems that bridge the physical and digital. We welcome individuals who may not identify as CSCW researchers or developers, including practitioners and developers actively working on infrastructure — metascience entrepreneurs, communities of builders in the Fediverse and AT Protocol social media ecosystems, and more.

→ Apply to participate · → Read the background