Virtual Workshop at MobileHCI 2020, October 5th
Mobile interaction is now almost exclusively dependent on an intransparent cloud infrastructure beyond the users' control, resulting in multiple issues related to security, privacy, and availability. While alternative approaches based on decentralized network architectures exist, these have their own set of issues such as lack of usability or content moderation.
In this workshop, we bring together researchers from related, but rarely interconnected fields to discuss issues and opportunities related to decentralization. We will develop and discuss current and future scenarios for decentralized mobile interaction, both utopian and dystopian. We invite researchers interested in implementation and networking aspects of mobile decentralization as well as those focusing on ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of these alternative approaches to the mobile ecosystem.
In this workshop, we will discuss existing and novel solutions for decentralization (e.g. P2P communication protocols, blockchains, decentralized infrastructures), focussing on their advantages, drawbacks, and implications for users and society by developing fictional scenarios using these technologies. To do so, we aim to bring together a wide range of researchers from varying backgrounds, research fields and experiences. In addition to researchers working in this area, we also encourage those who have practical experience with decentralised services, either from a development or a user perspective to learn from best and worst practices. In addition, we are interested in responses from those who take a critical stance towards future technologies coming from a sociology, philosophy or design background. Please feel free to contact the organiser team if you are unsure whether the workshop might be relevant to you.
We invite participants to submit a position paper of up to 4 pages length in CHI extended abstract format (excluding references). Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- (Lack of) incentives for using decentralized social systems, “tragedy of the commons”
- Emerging topics, e.g. COVID-19 contact tracing, secure multiparty computation, ...
- Utopian and dystopian design fiction on decentralized systems
- Content moderation in decentralized networks (both positive recommendations, and spam/abuse removal)
- Network protocols and software architectures for decentralization of mobile and IoT systems (peer-to-peer, blockchain, edge computing, ...)
- User-centric analysis of decentralized architectures; improving the usability of decentralized systems
- Decentralization in resource-constrained environments, e.g with limited Internet access
All position papers will be collected and published in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings series. In addition, we plan a subsequent collaboration with interested workshop participants to condense our results into an extended survey paper, to be submitted to a suitable venue such as IMWUT in late 2020.
Please submit your position paper (in sigchi-a format from the ACM template) by August 7th, 2020 via EasyChair.
Decisions will be announced by August 28th, 2020.
In preparation for the workshop, we will share all accepted position papers online to give you time and opportunity to familiarise yourself with them in preparation for fruitful discussions in the day. We will further ask you to prepare a short presentation about yourself in advance. As the workshop will be conducted virtually, authors of accepted papers are only required to pay a nominal 20 € registration fee. Please see the MobileHCI website for details about registration for the virtual main conference.
We hope to hear from you and look forward to an exciting virtual meetup!
- Britta Schulte, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (@brifrischu)
- Sujay Shalawadi, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (@sujaybshalawadi)
- Max van Kleek, University of Oxford (@emax)
- Florian Echtler, Aalborg University (@floemuc)
For further questions, send an email to florian.echtler@uni-weimar.de or britta.schulte@uni-weimar.de.