Dear friends,
We hope that you and your loved-ones are healthy and safe during this pandemic that unfortunately is still there. Last year, we were hoping to be able to meet you in person in 2021, but it was unfortunately not possible for most of us… Let’s keep crossing our fingers for 2022!
Despite the pandemic, 2021 was a productive year for the EUSSET community. Together we wrote our manifesto for this new decade, organized four major scientific events online and offline, established the EUSSET hub and started several community building activities. We upgraded our web portal and have started a blog series that all of you can contribute to.
In this message we want to give you an overview of all these activities and present what we are planning for the next future.
If you are not a member already, consider joining us to participate in this development!
Scientific events
- C&T 2021, chaired by Shelly Farham in Seattle (USA) and took place online – 2021.comtech.community This year we also sponsored a one-day pre-conference event in which researchers met with community members to help discover common ground and develop future plans (also online) – https://2021.comtech.community/community-day/
- ECSCW 2021 chaired by Mateusz Dolata and Gerhard Schwabe in Zurich (Switzerland) and also took place online – https://ecscw.eusset.eu/2021/
- Infrahealth 2021, chaired by Polyxeni Vasilakopoulou, Miria Grisot & Hilda Tellioglu took place (face to face!) in Kirstiansand (Norway).
- The 2021 Summer School took place (physically!) in Como – https://www.eusset.eu/summer-school-2021/
Communication and publicity actions
- We started in January with a survey about our services, and we would like to thank you for your responses, it helped us to shape our actions.
- The communication team of the SC has worked hard to rethink our website that was presented at ECSCW: https://www.eusset.eu/
- Our website now includes blog posts: https://www.eusset.eu/category/feature/ Do not hesitate to contact gerolf.nauwerck@uu.se if you would like to write one! More info on https://hub.eusset.eu/s/bloggers-corner/
- The EUSSET Steering Committee has collectively worked on the EUSSET Manifesto, from February to June 2021, revisiting the EUSSET position paper written at its creation for this new decade. The result of this collective work was then presented during the ECSCW conference, in a session where we collected feedback from the participants and gave the possibility to edit it asynchronously. The result is online: https://www.eusset.eu/about-eusset/manifesto-2021/
Community building activities and services
- The community team of the EUSSET SC has worked on a welcome message that you have received if you are a new EUSSET member; it reminds EUSSET members what EUSSET stands for and what are the services it provides.
- We now have a Hub that allows us to host events and to support networking in our community, for instance Circles on specific topics.
- 2 EUSSET Colloquiums took place. This colloquium is a forum where community members can engage in deep intellectual exchanges. It has been thought of as a way to help our members to further develop among other things papers, proposals or research agenda ideas.
- 2 Get-together sessions also took place for informal exchanges and serendipitous encounters.
Future actions
- Working on our IT infrastructure for offering
- Services for conferences (best practices/handbook, platform for registration handling, hub for fostering communication during the conference)
- Rework of the Digital Library user interface
- Better membership management (renewal of membership, access to circles, …)
- Institutional and Industrial Lobbying (using the manifesto)
- Being involved in EU working groups.
- Creating a group of industry and service companies, transfer findings, create student internship positions (as a means to bring closer the researchers and practitioners)
EUSSET is a Europe-based international association of researchers interested in practice-centered computing and socially embedded technologies.
If you’re not already a member, join us and help us develop EUSSET!
We wish you all a nice and relaxing break with friends and family, please stay safe!