Author: madisondeyo

We’re excited to welcome Dionna Taylor, Loizos Bitsikokos, and Thaty (pronounced Tatchi) Andrade Nunes as new core student members of CDSC!

Dionna is a first year MA/PhD student in the Communication Department at the University of Washington, being advised by Mako. She earned her B.A. in Psychology and Communication (also from UW) and is interested in the intersection of human behavior and technology, with a primary focus on online community collapse and online healthcare spaces. In her free time, you can find her reading, line dancing, or traveling.

Loizos is a PhD student at Purdue University’s Brian Lamb School of Communication. His academic journey began with degrees in physics and applied mathematics from the National Technical University of Athens (N.T.U.A.), followed by an MA in computational social science from the University of Chicago, focusing on sociology. His research lies at the intersection of computational social science, online platforms, and organizations. He’s particularly interested in the intricate relationship between algorithms and society. He also studies the tensions between structure and agency within online platforms, examining how platforms influence identity formation and whether users can resist institutionally ingrained biases. His work investigates the conceptualization of desire within platform infrastructures. When he has free time outside of academia, Loizos enjoys writing poems, making and collecting zines, watching cinema, taking photographs, walking in nature, and occasionally playing the saxophone.

Thaty (pronounced like Tatchi) is a first-year PhD student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University, advised by Professor Aaron Shaw. Her interest in studying online communities began while working at game companies in South Korea. In addition to creating social media videos, she was responsible for organizing engaging community events and managing online communities. She was fascinated by how quickly these communities could self-organize, whether by creating guides, wikis, or establishing their own rules and moderation systems. Thaty wants to investigate how communication and information technologies influence social outcomes, how online communities influence participants, what kind of participants (lurkers or active) join them, and why and how they contribute. She’s also interested in the different forms of community engagement such as collaboration, political mobilization, and organization. She’s originally from Brazil, lived in South Korea for seven years, and speaks Portuguese, English, Korean, and some Spanish! In her free time, she enjoys playing story-driven video games, watching horror movies/series, and spending time with friends

Interested in free and open source software? Want to hear insights from researchers, community leaders, contributors, and advocates working on and with FOSS?

Join us next weekend at the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference!

We will be running the Science of Community track on Friday August 2nd and Saturday August 3rd. We’re excited to have a number of awesome presenters speaking about their work. Check out the schedule below:

The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which aim to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we get so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations focus on how that work related to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.

Collaborations between practitioners and researchers can be transformative! Let’s get to know each other.

Tickets are still available at every price tier, check them out here.

We hope to see you there!

The Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) is less than a month away and we will be there!

We will be running the Science of Community track on Friday August 2nd and Saturday August 3rd. Check out the full schedule here.

We’re excited to have a number of really amazing speakers presenting their work. Check out the list below:

The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which aim to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we get so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations focus on how that work related to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.

We hope to see you at FOSSY. Even if you can’t make it to our sessions, we’ll be at the conference so stop by and say hello!

Worried you didn’t submit your FOSSY proposal on time? Well fear not, the deadline has been extended to Tuesday, June 18th. Submit your proposal today!

Does your work touch open source, communities, technology, or cooperation? Do you want to help bridge the gaps between research and practice? Join us at the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) this summer!

We’ll be running the Science of Community track, and are looking for presenters to speak to an audience of FOSS practitioners, developers, community organizers, contributors, and people just generally into and curious about FOSS. 

FOSSY is a low-stress opportunity to talk to people who your work can benefit. For topics, consider presenting implications from past papers, synthesizing work from your field overall, or floating ideas and problems (lightning talks! long talks! short talks!). A full track description and answers to common questions is available on our wiki.

We’re going to be at CHI! The Community Date Science Collective will be presenting work from group members and affiliates. CHI is taking place in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi from May 11th – 16th.

Jeremy Foote (Purdue University) coauthored “How Founder Motivations, Goals, and Actions Influence Early Trajectories of Online Communities” with Sanjay R Kairam. This work will be presented at “Online Communities: Engagement A” on Tuesday, May 14th at 9:45 a.m. You can also read about Jeremy and Sanjay’s work on our blog.

Carolyn Zou (Northwestern University) will be presenting with coauthor Helena Vasconcelos on their work “Validation Without Ground Truth? Methods for Trusts in Generative Simulations” at the CHI workshops HEAL (Human-Centered Evaluation and Auditing of Language Models) and TREW (Trust and Reliance in Evolving Human-AI Workflows). They will be presenting posters at both sessions and have been selected as a highlighted paper for HEAL and will be giving a presentation on Sunday, May 12th.

Ruijia Cheng (University of Washington) will be their presenting their research on “AXNav: Replaying Accessibility Tests from Natural Language” with cowriters Maryam Taeb, Eldon Schoop, Yue Jiang, Amanda Swearngin, and Jeffrey Nichols. This presentation will be taking place at “Universal Accessibility” on Tuesday, May 14th at 4:30 p.m.

CDSC affiliate Nicholas Vincent is receiving the Outstanding Dissertation Award for their research on “Economic Concentration and Dispossessive Data Use: Can HCI Solve Challenges from and to AI?“. Nicholas will also be presenting their papers “Pika: Empowering Non-Programmers to Author Executable Governance Policies in Online Communities” with Leijie Wang, Julija Rukanskaitė, and Amy X. Zhang at “Supporting Communities” on Thursday, May 16th at 11:00 a.m. and “A Canary in the AI Coal Mine: American Jews May Be Disproportionately Harmed by Intellectual Property Dispossession in Large Language Model Training” with Heila Precel, Brent Hecht, and Allison McDonald at “Politics of Data” on Wednesday, May 15th at 2:45 p.m.

Mandi Cai (Northwestern University) received an honorable mention award alongside coauthor Matthew Kay for their paper “Watching the Election Sausage Get Made: How Data Journalists Visualize the Vote Counting Process in U.S. Elections“. Mandi will be presenting this research at “Governance and Public Policies” on Wednesday, May 15th at 12:00 p.m.