The Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) is back for the fourth year in a row, and we’ll be running the Science of Community track, inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, bringing together practitioners and researchers to talk about scholarly work that’s relevant to the efforts of practitioners.
Does your work touch open source, communities, technology, or cooperation? Do you want to help bridge the gaps between research and practice? Join our track! The call for proposals is open and we’re looking for presenters interested in speaking to FOSS practitioners, developers, community organizers, contributors, and people into and curious about FOSS.
As researchers, we benefit 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 will focus on how that work relates to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.
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.
The CFP deadline is May 22nd and uses this form. We can’t wait for you to join us!
Come hang out with us at CHI 2026 in Barcelona April 13-17! Members of the Community Date Science Collective will be presenting work and we’d love to see you there.
Barcelona. View from the Sacred Heart Church at Tibidabo. By Oliver-Bonjoch, 2009, cc-by-sa 3.0.
CDSC members will be presenting at this years National Communication Association (NCA) Convention in Denver! You are warmly invited to join CDSC members during our talks and other scheduled events. Please come say hi!
Check out group members attending and what research they’ll be sharing:
Dyuti Jha: Dyuti will be presenting her paper titled “Mapping the Digital Life of Caste-Based Hate Speech” on Thursday, November 20th from 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM, discussing the processes of subreddit level moderation of caste-based hate speech in the absence of Reddit’s acknowledgement of Caste as a system of discrimination. The project seeks to understand how moderators in South Asian subreddits such as r/India and r/UnitedStatesofIndia identify caste based hate speech, how, if at all, they moderate it, whether the caste composition of the moderator teams for these subreddits influence the decision making on whether to or how to moderate such speech, and how they do so without any platform level guidelines. This project highlights a severely under researched area of caste in computing, particularly about how issues of identity bolsters or hinders inclusivity of a community.
Maddie Douglas: Maddie will be part of the Digital Rhetorics and Contemporary Media panel (Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division) on Friday, November 21st from 8:00 AM – 9:15 AM presenting a full paper titled “Strategic Ambiguity in the Modern Digital Age: Polysemy, Controversy, and AI Hype in the ‘Pause Giant AI Experiments’ Open Letter.” Maddie’s paper conducts a close reading of an “AI ethics” open letter that was spread shortly after GPT-4’s release, viewing it as a strategy to benefit AI investors and amplify hype. This reading makes a case for redefining “strategic ambiguity” from Leah Ceccarelli’s 1998 definition to include polysemy that achieves criticism (as well as praise) from audiences.
Hsuen-Chi (Hazel) Chiu: Hazel will be presenting her paper “AI Companions and the Illusion of Privacy: When Social Connection Meets Data Exposure” on Thursday, November 20th from 2:30 – 3:45 PM. She’ll discuss how users manage privacy when forming emotional relationships with AI companions. Drawing on interviews with 15 users of Replika and Character.AI, her study shows that people often treat these chatbots like trusted confidants while simultaneously worrying about how companies might use their data. Using Communication Privacy Management theory and the horizontal/vertical privacy framework, she highlights how users negotiate this tension between intimate disclosure and institutional surveillance. Her findings point to the need for more transparent, user-centered privacy design in emotionally supportive AI systems.
Srish Chatterjee: Srish will be at a day-long pre-conference called ‘Conspiratorial Economies,’ where they’ll present a full paper called “The Invisible Hand: Rhetorical Patterns in Conspiracy Theories on Technology’s Ubiquity.” Srish’s paper examines the rhetorical patterns of technological conspiracy theories and how they function as sophisticated folk epistemology that, while often factually inaccurate, articulate legitimate public anxieties about agency, surveillance, and corporate power in complex digital societies.
Interested in free and open source software? Want to hear insights from researchers, community leaders, contributors, and advocates working on and with FOSS?
We will be running the Science of Community track on Friday August 1st and Saturday August 2nd. We’re excited to have a number of awesome presenters speaking about their work. You can find the schedule here.
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.
Below, you can find the schedule of where our CDSC members will be:
Friday
10:30 – 11:45, HIGH-DENSITY: Advances and Best Practices in Text Classification: Computational Methods. Centennial A (Regency 3) (Benjamin Mako Hill will be the Session Chair)
13:30 – 14:45, Political Communication Poster Session: Political Communication. “The Politics of the Non-Political: A Scoping Review (2004–2024)” by Yufan Guo, Chinese U of Hong Kong, and Yibin Fan, University of Washington
13:30 – 14:45, HIGH-DENSITY: GIFTS in Instructional and Developmental Communication: Instructional and Developmental Communication. “Welcome Aboard: Simulating an Outsider-Within’s Organizational Assimilation and Socialization Through Role-Play” by Mavis Akom, Purdue U, Haley Sawyer, Purdue U, Loizos Bitsikokos, Purdue U, Alyssa Reed, Purdue U, Favour Ojike, Purdue U, Pamela Boateng, Purdue U, Onyinyechi Beatrice, Purdue U, Inusah Mohammed, Purdue U, Seungyoon Lee, Purdue U
Saturday
15:00 PM – 16:15, HIGH-DENSITY: Expression and Debates in Politics: “Unintended Politics: Partisan Opinion Expression and Incivility in Incidental Political Discussion” by Yibin Fan, U of Washington, Benjamin Mako Hill, U. of Washington, Patricia Moy, U. of Washington.
Sunday
12:00 – 13:15, Organizational Communication Research Escalator. “But Have You Tried to Ignore Them?” A Cross-National Comparison of Resilience Against Gendered Cyberhate in India and the USA by Bedadyuti Jha, Purdue U and Jeremy Foote, Purdue U.
15:00 – 16:15, Intergroup Communication Top Papers. Effects of Racial Minority Language Use on the Conversational Sustenance of Online Discussions by Haomin Lin, University of Washington, and Wang Liao, University of Washington.
Monday
10:30 – 11:45, NEKO-tiating Later Life: Digital Health, News Habits, and Tech Support: Communication and Technology. “Gig Work in Later Life: Sociodemographic and Digital Determinants of Older Adults’ Participation” by Floor Fiers, U of Amsterdam, Will Marler, Tilburg U, and Eszter Hargittai, U of Zurich.
Also, congratulations to Dr. Kaylea Champion, as her dissertation, “Social and Technical Sources of Risk in Sustaining Digital Infrastructure,” will be given the 2025 Annie Lang Dissertation Award from the International Communication Association Information Systems Division. The award will be given out at the ICA 2025 Information Systems business meeting 16:30 – 17:45 in Granite (Regency 3). Kaylea’s dissertation also received the 2025 Faculty Award for Outstanding Research Ph.D. Dissertation Award from the Department of Communication University of Washington. You can read more about Kaylea and her research on her homepage here.
Congrats to our CDSC folks on their accomplishments, and have safe travels to Denver this weekend!
We advocate for consideration of harms to communities (including online communities) as they respond to, are used for, and incorporate generative AI algorithms. One area of risk is one we call ‘Social Model Collapse,’ the notion that changes to community dynamics — social and technical — can disrupt the fundamental processes they rely on to sustain themselves and flourish. We see this as a clear point of shared concern among STS, HCI, Sociology, and Communication scholars, and are hosting an open panel at the upcoming meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), September 3-7 in Seattle. This panel is being coordinated by CDSC members Kaylea Champion (University of Washington) and Sohyeon Hwang (Princeton University) along with our colleague Hanlin Li (University of Texas).
From our call for submissions:
Model collapse in machine learning refers to the deterioration such a model faces if it is re-fed with its own output, removing variation and generating poor output; in this panel, we extend this notion to ask in what ways the use of algorithmic output in place of human participation in social systems places those social systems at risk. Recent research findings in the generation of synthetic text using large language models have fed and been fed by a rush to extract value from, and engage with, online communities. Such communities include the discussion forum Reddit, the software development communities producing open source, the participants in the question and answer forum StackExchange, and the contributors to the online knowledge base Wikipedia.
The success of these communities depends on a range of social phenomena threatened by adoption of synthetic text generation as a modality replacing human authors. Newcomers who ask naive questions are a source of members and leaders, but may shift their inquiries to LLMs and never join the community as contributors. Software communities are to some extent reliant on a sense of generalized reciprocity to turn users into contributors; such appreciation may falter if their apparent benefactor is a tireless bot. Knowledge communities are dependent on human curation, inquiry, and effort to create new knowledge, which may be systemically diluted by the presence of purported participants who are only algorithms echoing back reconstructions of the others. Meanwhile, extractive technology firms profit from anyone still engaging in a genuine manner or following their own inquiries.
In this panel, we invite consideration of current forms of social model collapse driven by a rush of scientific-industrial activity, as well as reflection on past examples of social model collapse to better contextualize and understand our present moment.
Submissions are 250-word abstracts due February 2nd; our panel is #223, “Risks of ‘Social Model Collapse’ in the Face of Scientific and Technological Advances” [Submission site link].
If you are attending the ACM conference on Computer-supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) this year CSCW in San José, Costa Rica. You are warmly invited to join CDSC members during our talks and other scheduled events. Please come say hi!
This CDSC has four papers at CSCW, which we will be presenting over the next three days:
Monday: At 11:00 am in Talamanca, Kaylea Champion will be presenting “Life Histories of Taboo Knowledge Artifacts” (full paper)
Tuesday: At 11:00 am in Central 3, Zarine Kharazian will be presenting “Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias” (full paper, blog post), followed by Sohyeon Hwang presenting “Adopting third-party bots for managing online communities” (full paper, blog post)
Wednesday: At 2:30 pm in Guanacaste 3, Kaylea Champion will be co-presenting “Challenges in Restructuring Community-based Moderation” (full paper, preprint)
If you’re at CSCW, feel free to get in touch in person or via Discord!
Interested in free and open source software? Want to hear insights from researchers, community leaders, contributors, and advocates working on and with FOSS?
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 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:
Kaylea and Matt will be presenting again!
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!
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.
By Robert Linsdell from St. Andrews, Canada – Flight from Honolulu to Hilo. Over Sand Island and Honolulu (503729), CC BY 2.0
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.
