At a high level, we will explore the following questions as we look to outline paths forward:

1. Mapping histories of harm: Meaningful partnerships with communities require us to contend with the histories of exploitation, power hierarchies, and harm in technology research. How can researchers establish field-level systems that map histories of harm to protect not only communities but also researchers with marginalized identities? Further, how can we deconstruct existing concepts and practices through an intersectional analysis of power (Erete et al., 2022)?

2. Sites of community-collaborative research: The state, the public, and the market each have their own relationship with society, and accordingly can conflict as sites of research. How can researchers pick partnerships and move between them with these conflicts in mind?

3. Scaling community-based research: Scalability and universality are core values of computing; but these impulses often run counter to core tenets of community-collaborative work, for example building trust between researchers and communities and emphasizing appropriate interventions. Are scale and CCA necessarily incommensurate? And if they are, how should researchers frame the value of their community-collaborative contributions alongside mainstream pursuits of universalism? Furthermore, what adjustments to CCA approaches are necessary to suit the needs of different geopolitical contexts?

4. Committing to community-collaborative approaches: Community-collaborative research requires commitment to balancing both the expectations of research fields and the community’s needs at present. In research partnerships, misalignment in expectations for project timelines, end dates, and terms can arise. How can researchers negotiate research partnerships that respect community needs and accomplish researchers’ goals? What strategies can researchers use to manage discomfort with assuming ‘liaison’ responsibilities between community and research expectations? 

5. The role of CCA in CSCW: Taking a step back, does shifting the focus of CSCW towards CCA truly help us achieve equity for our communities? And more broadly, what role would community-collaborative technology research have in shaping the values of computing towards justice-oriented futures?

6. Connections across computing disciplines: This panel also provides an opportunity to draw into CSCW the perspectives of researchers from related disciplines (e.g., responsible computing, ethical AI/ML), industry practitioners, and non-profit workers—including community partners who either already work with or are interested in working with computing researchers. Prior to this workshop, the panelist and organizing team will have led a CRAFT session at the FAccT 2023 conference. Audience members from FAccT who are interested in deeper discussions will be invited to apply to our workshop.

0. Pre-Workshop Discussion — Participants will introduce themselves, generate topics of discussion, and share favorite resources/readings, which will inform our time together.

Synchronous Workshop Activities

1a. Knowledge sharing and expert roundtable — We will utilize an expert roundtable with five expert CCA researchers (Ghoshal, Smith, Wong-Villacres, Wilcox, Erete). Drawing upon the experts’ multifaceted expertise on CCA work. Each expert will present for 3-5 minutes a) an overview of their research and b) a position statement related to structural barriers to CCA in CSCW, intended to catalyze audience reflection. Following, we will facilitate at Q&A session. Throughout these discussions, we will encourage workshop participants to identify potential artifacts that the CSCW research community needs to make progress towards addressing the identified structural barriers—e.g., compilations of best practices, guidance for researchers and funders, shared datasets, etc.

1b. Artifact development — Workshop participants then will split into small groups to work towards the artifacts sourced in Activity 1a. These formats might include papers, articles for Interactions Magazine or similar equivalents, crowdsourced resources like Awesome Lists, further panels focused on specific barriers, programming for early-career researchers, and more. Workshop organizers will provide support and connect participants with existing resources where needed. This will be structured as a cross between a collaborative hackathon (e.g., D'Ignazio et al., 2016) and a writing group, with specific emphasis on starting to execute the artifacts. Participants will take away from this experience both a starting point for working towards these artifacts and the opportunity to network and connect with other researchers in this space. After the workshop, we will share out the documents and encourage each small group towards post-workshop collaboration.

2. Collaborative wrap-up — The workshop will conclude with a group share out and wrap-up discussion. In their groups, participants will introduce their in-progress concepts, provide reflections on their takeaways from the workshop, and solicit feedback for moving forward from the rest of the workshop participants. Workshop organizers will keep track of these tensions and lessons to document the process of engaging in CCA research for future resource development.

Through this workshop attendees will have the opportunity to engage with and learn from the collective expertise of the panelists. By creating space for discussion across different perspectives on CCA research, we anticipate the following outcomes:

1. Attendees will have exposure to the breadth of CCA research at CSCW and across allied computing research communities (e.g., HCI, FAccT)

2. We will collaboratively develop a digital artifact cultivated from live notes taken during the panel discussion. This artifact will serve as a living resource document for people interested in CCA in CSCW and allied communities.

3. Through collective entanglements with tensions surfaced through our discussion, we will outline concrete steps we as a research community must take to address structural barriers that constrain CCA research from happening in CSCW.

4. Participants will begin to work towards these concrete steps through structured small-group activities organized around making progress on shared artifacts (Activity 1b). Small groups will be encouraged to continue their work on these artifacts after the workshop, to continue momentum.

5. We will also form connections among a broad range of CCA-focused communities into CSCW. This will include researchers and practitioners in computing fields and community members looking for partnerships.