Hubb(le) Bubble – CHI2022 Updates
It’s been wonderful to see so many registrations to the conference since we opened the system, and exciting to see the previews of papers people are posting online. We’re working hard to figure out this very weird CHI. As always, we appreciate your patience and you should feel free to contact Simone or I if you have any questions.
Here are some updates about the conference!
We will be using Hubb as our online conference platform
Hubb (https://www.hubb.me/) is a system that has been used by comparable conferences like SIGGRAPH and SuperComputing. As a team, we looked at a dozen different platforms, with a very deep dive of a final list of four platforms. The decision teams were the general chairs, technical program chairs, and equity, justice and accessibility chairs – with plenty of feedback from others. Considerations included cost, accessibility features, stability, team experience and similar parameters.
Our volunteers are working hard with Executive Events to structure the site, streamline processes and make sure data is moving between all of our systems. SPOILER: things will go wrong. These platforms are often only roughly parallel to what we need. We’re doing everything we can to make the experience great for online participants – but we’re sure problems will arise. When they do, we’ll be there to listen and learn.
We will be using Discord to help build community and connect
Following the work SIGCHI has done in building communities on Discord, we will have a CHI2022 Discord channel where people will be able to interact more informally. That site will be limited to registered members of CHI and will go away after CHI is over. Research in online communities show ephemerality can be a powerful tool. We’ll still be interacting with you over Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and *of course* Hubb. Discord will be for fun and interaction.
We’re focusing our efforts on key content experiences
We had been planning to do a CHI preview event (a.k.a. the web exclusive) where some content was to be open and broadcasted a few weeks before the conference. While we were excited to offer a preview event, we decided to move to unlocking and opening some livestreams at the event itself by making them open for anyone to view, whether they are registered or not. Not only will these livestreams energize the conference with outreach, but they will also save time (for our volunteers and presenters) and reduce the overall monetary cost. We still have some details to work here, but we’ve removed references to the pre-conference event from our site. This does not affect the virtual courses and workshops that are scheduled before the main conference.
COVID Updates
At the time of this post, trends in the U.S. are looking decent. We’re now working on implementation details for our health and safety policies. For example, what full vaccination means, how to support testing, and what types of policies exist on the ground. We’ll be posting more about this after we have more conversations with some vendors we are working with.
