CSAR Workshop

This week, as part of the “Third International Conference on Social Computing and its Applications” we held a workshop “Collective Social Awareness and Relevance (CSAR)”. Organising the workshop (along with Walter Colombo) over the last couple of months has been an interesting process - this is the first time I’ve had the chance to get involved in “real” workshop organisation, so this is the first time I’ve seen the process up close. It’s a very involved process: from deciding upon and inviting Program Committee members, publicising the workshop, soliciting submissions, and navigating through the review process and getting a set of accepted papers it’s been a fair challenge. Really it wouldn’t have been possible without Walter doing such a good job of pushing the PC members to get their reviews done, he really drove that whole process, so I could sit back a bit there.

We ended up with 3 good papers accepted, which were presented in a session yesterday morning. The talks were informative and useful, and generated a good number of questions and discussion, which is really all you can hope for. It was also my first time chairing a session at a conference, which was fairly daunting, but turned out to be fairly easy and interesting. It was nice to be the one asking the difficult questions at the end of the presentation, rather than being on the receiving end.

Overall the workshop went very well. I wasn’t sure beforehand whether we’d try and run it again, but actually now I think it would be a shame not to. I’ll keep my eyes out for a conference that we can latch onto sometime next year.