October 2026 - Test-list - communitydata.science

Report back from CSCW 2026
by Community Data Science Collective 18 Oct '26

18 Oct '26

Post : Report back from CSCW 2026 URL : https://blog.communitydata.science/report-back-from-cscw-2026/ Posted : October 18, 2026 at 20:23 Author : Nate TeBlunthuis Tags : artificial intelligence, conference, cscw, free/libre open source software Categories : Conferences and Presentations, Reflections, Uncategorized @groceryheist, @yiweiwu, @kaylea, and @mako attended CSCW 2026 from Oct 10 through Oct 14. A previous blog post ( https://blog.communitydata.science/cdsc-at-cscw-2026-rules-knowledge-gaps-a… ) covers our presentations. Here we're sharing some takeaways and highlights from the conference. I (Nate) wrote this post, so it naturally reflects my views most, but I'm also drawing on my conversations with the other CDSC attendees. Takeaways from OSS + AI Workshop Kaylea Champion, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Matt Gaughan helped organize a CSCW workshop ( https://wiki.communitydata.science/OSS_AI_Workshop_(CSCW_2026) ) on Open Source Software and artificial intelligence, and Kaylea, Mako, and Nate attended. The workshop was conceived and framed as a conversation focused on problems open source practitioners have raised related to building sustainable collaborative software projects in the open. However, I was both astonished and energized by how workshop participants' focus seemed to shift toward more foundational and future-looking questions about the nature of collaboration and its role in software production in the first place. Kaylea shared how the OSS developers she has interviewed recently are using AI intensively and enthusiastically, and Mako seemed joyous at the fun he's been having contributing in previously unimagined ways to projects like LaTeX. But even though AI seems to make open source developers more productive, it also raises the question: what makes code worth sharing at all? Nate shared how he's used Claude Code to create a bespoke application for data annotation, and then three other attendees described doing the same thing. Should we share these software projects, even if they are idiosyncratic? How do ubiquitous AI tools change the role of open software and knowledge commons when the value of a project shifts from its code or features (which may be easy to replicate) to its reputation, trustworthiness, ubiquity, or role in a project ecosystem? Mako, building on insights he also shared in a presentation at UT Austin in September about his new book Peer Production ( https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262054805/peer-production/ ) in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series (co-authored with Aaron Shaw and Christian Pentzold; available open access here ( https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/6212/Peer-Production ) ), described a potentially deeper threat AI poses to Open Source now that Open Source developers are using AI coding tools. If I use a "frontier" agent to write a patch, and it generates buggy or otherwise inadequate code that I fix, it sends my corrections back to its company, which can use this information to train the next model version. In this way, AI agents collect knowledge from open source developers and aggregate it into new models, which their companies can then sell back to open source developers. This distributed production of knowledge, which is then aggregated and disseminated, resembles a peer production process, only the aggregate artifact is a private good (although distillation of open-weight models may transmit some of this knowledge into a commons in some sense). A CSCW poster ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3785651.3831559 ) by Caitlin Morris and Pattie Maes presented a system that I found really interesting for envisioning future modes of knowledge sharing among collaborators using AI tools. Notes from the Lasting Impact Award The question "what's CSCW's role in AI research?" was asked in one form or another in panels and conversations at CSCW 2026. Does CSCW need to jump on the AI bandwagon and study industry-facing problems? Maybe, but what makes that different from mainstream AI or NLP research? Should CSCW focus critically on social problems related to AI? Certainly, but that work also happens at FAccT among other conferences. What does CSCW have to contribute that other fields wouldn't? Surprisingly, I found one of the most compelling answers in Nikki Kittur's presentation at the session on the lasting impact award he received with Robert Kraut for their 2008 paper "Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in Wikipedia: quality through coordination ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1460563.1460572 ) ". Mako was also on the panel, and in his discussion he pointed out the same thing that impressed me from Nikki's talk. Nikki showed how the concepts of implicit and explicit coordination he and Kraut introduced in 2008 for understanding Wikipedia are useful for designing tools that use AI to support collaborative workflows in ways that just prompting a chatbot or agent can't achieve. The more general answer, which I find inspiring, is that CSCW has built a rich base of concepts that can be productively applied to create new understandings of how AI can be designed, built, and used collaboratively. Nikki's talk showed how engaging concepts from CSCW's legacy can lead to novel research ideas, and I think such scholarship has a disciplinary character that can earn respect and distinction in a way that bandwagoning rarely does. Highlights from paper sessions Here are a few paper presentations by people outside CDSC we thought wroth highlighting. There's one pick from each of us who attended. I (Nate) have lightly edited the others' descriptions. Nate's pick: People Can Accurately Predict Behavior of Complex Algorithms That Are Available, Compact, and Aligned by Lindsay Popowski, Helena Vasconcelos, Ignacio Javier Fernandez Heinsen, Chijioke Mgbahurike, Ralf Herbrich, Jeff Hancock, and Michael S. Bernstein. https://doi.org/10.1145/3788067 This paper's title is a great description of the findings and central contribution. The problem of designing algorithmic systems to make them less opaque and confusing is usually framed as making AI "explainable" or "interpretable". This framing centers the model and seemingly constrains the solution space to the problem of making the inner workings of complex mathematical models comprehensible to end users. I love how this paper reframes this problem from computational complexity to cognitive complexity in terms of a user's ability to construct a valid intuition for the model's behavior. Then they show that this sort of problem, which also seems closer to what many use cases actually need, is solvable by models that are good at one comprehensible and useful thing. This is a really cool example of positivist HCI research that conceives a theory by drawing from HCI and cognitive science and then tests it in a straightforward experiment. Kaylea's pick: The Persistence of Retracted Papers on Wikipedia by Haohan Shi, Yulin Yu, Daniel Romero, and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát https://doi.org/10.1145/3817014 Kaylea wrote: It takes a (very) long time for retracted papers to get removed from Wikipedia, and the problem is worse for highly-cited papers but better for open access papers. I suspect that journals and academics can do more to set the record straight when retractions happen. Mako's pick: Creating Group Rules with AI: Human-AI Collaboration in WhatsApp Moderation by Gauri Nayak, Farhana Shahid, Kiran Garimella, and Aditya Vashistha. https://doi.org/10.1145/3816915. Mako wrote: A speculative design paper that worked with 20 WhatsApp admins to use an AI to generate rules. It's an interesting experiment that I think challenges some things the CDSC work on rules has taken for granted and that uses methods extremely different from those we would use to approach the problems. The work points to a range of interesting future research directions for rule researchers. Yiwei's pick: The Activist’s Guide to the Decentralized Social Universe by Sybille Légitime and Harini Suresh. https://doi.org/10.1145/3817010 Yiwei wrote: I like how the authors of this paper take platform choice as a question of collective action, showing that leaving a platform only works if communities can find somewhere that fits their specific threats and resources. Add a comment to this post: https://blog.communitydata.science/report-back-from-cscw-2026/#respond -- Manage Subscriptions https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email… Unsubscribe: https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email…

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The Politics of the “Non-Political”
by Community Data Science Collective 12 Oct '26

12 Oct '26

Post : The Politics of the “Non-Political” URL : https://blog.communitydata.science/the-politics-of-the-non-political/ Posted : October 12, 2026 at 09:25 Author : Yibin Fan Categories : Papers, Publications Communication around politics matters a lot for the healthy development of a society. We usually associate political information with campaigns, public appearances by politicians, and discussions about voting. Yet politically relevant information nowadays frequently enters everyday life: when people decide which city or neighborhood to live in, when groups gather around sharply different cultures, and even when people date each other. These everyday connections are at the heart of our new article, “The Politics of the ‘Non-Political’: A Conceptual Review ( https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2026.2745844 ) ”, published in Political Communication. My co-author Yufan Guo ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/yufan-guo-817625378/ ) , a PhD student in Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and I (Yibin Fan ( https://www.yibinfan.cc/ ) ) set out to understand how researchers conceptualize the relationship between politics and what they call “non-political.” The rapid development of media technologies further blurs these boundaries. On social media, for instance, you cannot always prevent yourself from encountering political videos or advertisements, even when you go online for something entirely different. This keeps pushing social scientists to ask: is politics necessarily bounded by political institutions? And when we look beyond those institutions, what on earth counts as political or nonpolitical? Scholarly interest in these questions has grown alongside their presence in everyday life. As the figure below shows, the number of articles in political science and communication with relevant terms roughly tripled over the past two decades. Yet beneath this growing interest, we found surprising inconsistency in how the term is conceptualized, often without a clear definition of either side of the boundary. https://blog.communitydata.science/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/10/pub_c… Amazed, while also puzzled, by this trend in both everyday life and academia, we began reading relevant articles. We started with political science and communication, and followed the question into other fields, which we have found in information science, sociology, and management. Along the way, we encountered studies asking, “What does ‘political’ mean to you? ( https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9212-2 ) ” We read about social movement organizers strategically politicizing or depoliticizing their identities ( https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14742837.2019.1631153 ) , and about political discussion flourishing in communities around The Bachelor ( https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099180 ) , the popular American reality TV show—just to name a few. As we read more, we settled on a scope: empirical studies published in SSCI-indexed political science and communication journals that included “non-political” in their titles, abstracts, or keywords. This gave us 140 articles to review. This is certainly not a perfect way to capture every relevant study. But we believe that explicitly using the term signals an intentional effort to conceptualize the nonpolitical—or, more specifically, to understand politics through its relationship with something considered nonpolitical. Across these articles, we identified eight types of nonpolitical entities. Some concern actors, such as social media influencers and opinion leaders; identities, including religious and gender identities and politicians’ personal identities; issues, such as sexual violence and technology; and content, including memes, everyday posts, and sports news. Others concern media channels, such as Google Play and entertainment communities; social contexts, including dating and social relationships; collective action, such as environmental protests and silence; and cognition, including anger and the desire to emigrate. The range itself was striking: “nonpolitical” could describe a person, a platform, a feeling, or a form of action. We further identified two salient approaches to conceptualizing the nonpolitical. The first is categorical. Researchers treat the political and nonpolitical as distinct categories, comparing them or tracing spillovers between them—for example, how engagement with nonpolitical content might affect political attitudes. The second is contextual. Researchers understand the political and nonpolitical as embedded in one another, with their relationship depending on the setting. Something understood as nonpolitical may become political, or vice versa, through processes of politicization and depoliticization. The following figure illustrates these different ways of relating the two. https://blog.communitydata.science/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/10/conce… Finally, we asked why these relational modes exist at all, and why they take such varied forms. In the studies we reviewed, the nonpolitical almost always helped researchers better understand or articulate the nature of politics. Drawing a boundary between the two also has a long history in Western philosophical traditions. But researchers do not all draw that boundary in the same way. We believe these differences reflect several influences: institutional or relational views of politics, post-positivist or interpretive and critical theoretical orientations, methodological considerations, and rhetorical tensions in how scholars frame their arguments. For us, this review responds to both empirical realities and scholarly debates about the relationship between politics and the nonpolitical in communication processes. It brings together a growing body of research while also inviting reflection on the nature of politics itself. We thus suggest that (de)politicization can offer a sharp conceptual perspective for future research. It directs attention to how these boundaries are constructed, challenged, and changed. It also invites us to think critically about power: who gets to define something as political or nonpolitical, and what follows from that definition? This article also grew through many conversations. I presented our very initial findings and groupings in a graduate seminar on the social construction of news at UW Communication and at the annual retreat of our Community Data Science Collective (CDSC). I was amazed by the positive feedback. Many of us shared a sense that political polarization was becoming visible across more areas of social and public life, which made these questions feel especially relevant. That reception motivated us to develop the review further and present it as a poster at ICA 2025. There, I spoke with at least 30 people interested in the study. Those conversations helped us see how the questions resonated across different research interests. Publishing this conceptual review in Political Communication, as a team consisting of just two doctoral students, makes the experience especially meaningful to us. We are grateful to the journal’s editors and reviewers for their thoughtful work, and to everyone who offered feedback along the way. All of these conversations helped make this article possible. Add a comment to this post: https://blog.communitydata.science/the-politics-of-the-non-political/#respo… -- Manage Subscriptions https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email… Unsubscribe: https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email…

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CDSC at CSCW 2026: Rules, Knowledge Gaps, and AI in Open Source
by Community Data Science Collective 06 Oct '26

06 Oct '26

Post : CDSC at CSCW 2026: Rules, Knowledge Gaps, and AI in Open Source URL : https://blog.communitydata.science/cdsc-at-cscw-2026-rules-knowledge-gaps-a… Posted : October 6, 2026 at 08:08 Author : Benjamin Mako Hill Categories : Conferences and Presentations, Papers The Community Data Science Collective is heading to CSCW 2026 ( https://cscw.acm.org/2026/ ) in Salt Lake City, Utah, October 10–14. Mako Hill, Kaylea Champion, Nate TeBlunthuis, and Yiwei Wu will be there. We hope you’ll join us at any of the sessions below. https://blog.communitydata.science/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/10/cscw2… Tuesday, October 13, 2:30 pm (Skylight Ballroom, Crowdsourcing & Peer Production) Nate TeBlunthuis will present “The Relational Origins of Rules in Online Communities,” a paper with an all-CDSC author list of Charles Kiene, Sohyeon Hwang, Carl Colglazier, Nathan TeBlunthuis, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill. Although Charles Kiene sadly won't be there to present it, the paper reflects his excellent dissertation work ( https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/items/e4c3e4d8-c8be-4273-8… ) . (full paper ( https://doi.org/10.1145/3817015 ) ) In the same session, Leah Ajmani will present “Sanctioned by Others: Remediating Knowledge Exclusion on Wikipedia Through Design” by Leah Ajmani, Moyan Zhou, Tanja Andic, Amber Berson, Isaac Johnson, Benjamin Mako Hill, Rebecca Maung, Sneha Narayan, Sarah Severson, Loren Terveen, and Stevie Chancellor. The paper received a DEI Recognition. (full paper ( https://doi.org/10.1145/3816994 ) ) Wednesday, October 14, 9:00 am (Salon E, Decentralized Social Media) Yiwei Wu will present “AI Didn’t Start the Fire: Examining the Stack Exchange Moderator and Contributor Strike” by Yiwei Wu, Leah Ajmani, Nathan TeBlunthuis, and Hanlin Li. (blog post ( https://blog.communitydata.science/ai-didnt-start-the-fire-how-stack-exchan… ) , full paper ( https://doi.org/10.1145/3788040 ) ) The same session will also have “Understanding Community-Level Blocklists in Decentralized Social Media” by Owen Xingjian Zhang, Sohyeon Hwang (CDSC alum and affiliate), Yuhan Liu, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández (CDSC affiliate). (full paper ( https://doi.org/10.1145/3817026 ) ) Wednesday, October 14, 11:00 am (Salon D, Lasting Impact Award) Benjamin Mako Hill will give a talk in the Lasting Impact Award session honoring Aniket Kittur and Robert Kraut’s now-classic CSCW 2008 paper, “Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in Wikipedia: Quality through coordination.” Saturday, October 10, 9:00 am–5:30 pm (Snowbird) Beyond the main conference, Matt Gaughan, Kaylea Champion, and Benjamin Mako Hill are co-organizing the workshop Beyond Productivity: AI, Community, and Sustainability in Open Source Software ( https://wiki.communitydata.science/OSS_AI_Workshop_(CSCW_2026) ) with Eli Min, Hana Frluckaj, Kevin Crowston, and James Howison. The workshop looks at how generative AI and agentic coding are changing newcomer participation, maintainer burden, trust, and sustainability in open source communities. We look forward to meeting you all in person at CSCW! Add a comment to this post: https://blog.communitydata.science/cdsc-at-cscw-2026-rules-knowledge-gaps-a… -- Manage Subscriptions https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email… Unsubscribe: https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email…

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We’re hiring! Join the CDSC as a Program Coordinator
by Community Data Science Collective 05 Oct '26

05 Oct '26

Post : We’re hiring! Join the CDSC as a Program Coordinator URL : https://blog.communitydata.science/were-hiring-join-the-cdsc-as-a-program-c… Posted : October 5, 2026 at 07:00 Author : Aaron Shaw Categories : Join CDSC, Reflections Come join us and maybe watch the sunrise over Lake Michigan! Do you care about community, design, computing, and research? We are hiring a program coordinator ( https://careers.northwestern.edu/psc/hrnu_er/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM_FL.HR… ) to grow the public impact of the Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) ( https://communitydata.science ) and Northwestern University Center for Human Computer Interaction +Design (HCI+D) ( https://hci.northwestern.edu ) . The person in this role will work across both groups, focusing on outreach and communications, managing social media and web content, promoting research and activities to internal and external audiences, building research communities, strategic event planning, and supporting program administration for both the CDSC and HCI+D. The position is full time and based in Evanston on the Northwestern University campus (although a portion of the work may be done remotely). The average salary for similar positions at Northwestern is around $55,000 per year and includes benefits (compensation details for this position can only be determined by Northwestern HR in the hiring process). The position is available as a 2-year term-limited role, with the possibility of additional years depending on available funding. Details regarding specific responsibilities, duties, minimum qualifications, and competencies are available via the job posting on the Northwestern HR website ( https://careers.northwestern.edu/psc/hrnu_er/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM_FL.HR… ) . About Northwestern’s Center for HCI+Design and the Community Data Science Collective The Community Data Science Collective ( https://communitydata.science ) is an interdisciplinary research group made up of faculty, students, and affiliates ( https://communitydata.science/People ) mainly at the University of Washington Department of Communication, the Northwestern University Department of Communication Studies, the Carleton College Computer Science Department, the iSchool at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Purdue University School of Communication. To learn more about the Community Data Science Collective, you should check out our wiki ( https://communitydata.science ) , blog ( https://blog.communitydata.science ) , and recent publications ( https://communitydata.science/Publications ) . Northwestern’s Center for Human Computer Interaction + Design ( https://hci.northwestern.edu ) brings together researchers and practitioners from across the university to study, design, and develop the future of human and computer interaction at home, work, and play. The center draws upon Northwestern’s pioneering leadership in interaction and design research, and supports researchers in their pursuit of new interaction paradigms to support a collaborative, sustainable, and equitable society. Contact Please contact Aaron Shaw ( mailto:aaronshaw@northwestern.edu ) with questions. Both the CDSC and the Center for HCI+D are committed to creating diverse, inclusive, equitable, and accessible environments. We actively work to maintain an open community where each person’s experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives are valued and encouraged. We look forward to working with someone who shares these values. Ready to apply? Please apply via the Northwestern University job posting ( https://careers.northwestern.edu/psc/hrnu_er/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM_FL.HR… ) (and note that the job ID is 54580). We will begin reviewing applications immediately (continuing on a rolling basis until the position is filled). Add a comment to this post: https://blog.communitydata.science/were-hiring-join-the-cdsc-as-a-program-c… -- Manage Subscriptions https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email… Unsubscribe: https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email…

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