Apply

Click here to apply (submission link coming soon)

Call for participation

We seek to bring together an eclectic group of scholars and practitioners who approach infrastructure from different disciplinary or professional backgrounds and positionalities. This includes — but is not limited to — researchers working in CSCW, HCI, information science, STS, software studies, data science, and team science, as well as practitioners actively building and maintaining infrastructure (metascience entrepreneurs, Fediverse and AT Protocol builders, open-source maintainers, data stewards, and others).

If you are interested in what it means to research, design, or develop both within and for collaborative sociotechnical ecologies — see the Background for the full framing — we’d love to hear from you.

What to submit

A 3-5-page position paper that addresses the themes of the workshop and provides evidence of work done on the topic. We define “position paper” broadly: provocations, experience reports, problem descriptions, and in-progress prototypes and findings are all welcome. Please include a brief bio at the end. We are not imposing any specific format, but for readability, please use 1-inch margins and at least 11-pt font.

Position papers will be shared among attendees and will provide a jumping off point for discussions. We encourage authors to focus position papers on topics they would like to share and discuss with other workshop attendees relevant to the workshop themes. The following are some prompts that your position paper might respond to:

• How have you attempted to build resources for data-intensive knowledge work that satisfy specific use cases that are also applicable to a broader range of application areas?
• How and for what specific purposes (practical and/or theoretical) have you developed or applied concepts or theories to deepen understanding about how infrastructures are constructed, maintained, or dismantled?
• How do you identify and account for asymmetries of power among stakeholders in pre-infrastructural settings? What forms of negotiation, mediation, resistance, or accommodation emerge in your work?
• What sociotechnical conditions (e.g., governance structures, trust relationships, maintenance culture, interoperability standards, funding, communication routines) constitute a sufficiently developed collaborative ecology for infrastructural interventions to become viable? To what extent can infrastructures actively produce the collaborative ecologies they require, rather than leaning on pre-existing alignments?
• Do you have a development or implementation experience to report on that can help us think through the challenges, opportunities, and methods of bridging local concerns/practices with infrastructural ambitions?
• Have you observed that AI infrastructures such as large language models and data centers require new kinds of collaborative ecologies? Have you identified new research methods and challenges while investigating AI infrastructures?

Deadlines

• Submission deadline: TBD (11:59 pm Anywhere on Earth)
• Notification: August 17, 2026
• Workshop: TBD: October 10 or 11, 2026 (one day, in person at CSCW 2026)

How submissions will be reviewed

A committee of reviewers will evaluate each submission using a simple rubric:

1. Clarity
2. Relevance to the call for submissions
3. Uniqueness or originality of the articulated position

We intend to accept up to 25 submissions and run the workshop with 15–30 participants (including organizers). Depending on the number and nature of submissions, the review committee may group papers according to similar or complementary themes, and pre-assign breakout reading and discussion groups based on these affinities.

Participation

The workshop is in-person only. Maximum number of participants is 30, including organizers. Accepted authors will be expected to register for the CSCW 2026 workshop track and attend in person. Registration for just the workshop (and not the full CSCW conference) is a possibility.

Questions

Email joelchan@umd.edu.