*Have you been wrestling with CSCW data? * *Do you have a visualization of use that could help you out? * *Send us a two-pager and share your ideas!* ** *We want you!* ** * Visualization for Understanding CSCW Data: A CSCW 2010 Workshop* CSCW systems can be very complex to understand and analyze. Users click in various places, talk to each other, and collaboratively travel through websites. Their work in these places can often be best understood through data visualization: laying out the data visually can make sense of a great deal of data. This workshop expands on ideas from past workshops that have touched on visualization as a way of understanding data, including the CSCW 2004 Workshop on Social Networks<http://projects.ischool.washington.edu/mcdonald/cscw04/> . The goal of this workshop is to gather people using visualizations to help in analyzing and understanding collaborative behaviour with CSCW systems in order to share and exchange tools and techniques, and collectively determine the utility of these tools/techniques and how to disseminate these tools/techniques in other venues to help other researchers gain access to these analysis methods. We solicit perspectives from a variety of CSCW authors and researchers who have incorporated existing visualizations into their analyses, or have created novel visualizations in order to understand their data. Workshop Structure and Design The workshop will commence with lightning (2-3 minute) introductions intended to get participants to recognize each other and become refreshed on each others’ work. The introductions will follow a prescribed format, including slides shown from a central source sent in advance. During the day, the workshop will focus on a series of topics based on the submissions. We anticipate that topics may include issues of *scale*(visualizations of large spaces, visualizations of small groups); *technologies* (custom-crated visualizations; use of existing techniques and packages); and *axes *(mappings on geographical spaces; arbitrary spaces). These will be determined by the organizers after the submissions are evaluated. For each distinct topic, our goal is to collect, classify, and organize the existing work, integrating visualizations to inform the wider CSCW community of the broad range of visualizations available for their analyses. If participants’ interests are sufficiently different or if the workshop attracts sufficient interest, we may break the participants into distinct breakout groups. Artefacts and results The workshop will produce a poster to be presented at the CSCW poster session, with samples of the participants’ visualizations, as well as results of any organizing or taxonomizing that the participants may have done, and resource lists that participants will have organized. We are investigating publishing the results of the workshop as a special issue of a journal. Participation In order to ensure intimacy, close interaction and fruitful results, we will favor a small number of participants (16-22, including 2-3 student participants and workshop organizers). Two to three students (in addition to those who submit full workshop position papers) will also be invited to participate. This will provide students pursuing research in this area a unique opportunity to interact with key researchers in the field and help define future directions. Students will need to submit a one-page paper describing their interest in the area of activity-centric groupware systems and their motivation for wanting to participate. What to Submit Send short position paper (under 2000 words, PDF format) to danyelf@microsoft.com. It should cover the following topics: · *Interest & Experiences:** *a description of the your interest and past or current experiences with visualizations designed to analyze CSCW data. · *Insights and lessons learned:* a short discussion of your visualizations, the insights you gained from using them as well as the lessons learned by integrating visualizations in their analysis. · *Workshop goals:** *your motivation for attending the workshop and the goals you hope to achieve as a result of the workshop. · *Bio:** *your current affiliation(s) and background. We will review the position papers, recruiting additional reviewers as needed. Important Dates - *November 20, 2009* - Position papers due; submissions will be acknowledged by email - *December 11, 2009 *- Notification of acceptance - *January 8, 2010* - Final position papers due - *January 15, 2010* - Organizers distribute position papers and soapbox topics to all participants - *February 7, 2010 *- Workshop Organizers *Danyel Fisher <http://research.microsoft.com/~danyelf>*, Microsoft Research *Nathalie Henry <http://research.microsoft.com/~nath>*, Microsoft Research *Sheelagh Carpendale<http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~sheelagh/wiki/pmwiki.php> *, University of Calgary *Stacey Scott <http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~s9scott/wiki/pmwiki.php>*, University of Waterloo