I should first say that the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) is a top-tier venue for my area of research, and over the last years it published authoritative research on Social Media use during humanitarian crises. As a result, this was the main venue we targeted for our paper “What to Expect When the Unexpected Happens: Social Media Communications Across Crises” that describes the largest comparative study of social media use across a variety of crisis situations. This is the project I am most proud of, and being able to present it myself was very important to me. Participating to CSCW not only allowed me to promote my work, but it also helped me to connect and reconnect with much more experienced researchers that share my interests – many of whom I knew about by reading their papers; and this was particularly useful given that I’m approaching the end of my PhD program (in December this year).

Among the conference activities, very interesting and quite useful has been the Monday Social Lunch event designed mainly for newcomers, and for which we were able to sign up depending on our interests to specific lunches – hosted by a member of the CSCW community which had selected in advance the discussion topic. Overall, I was impressed by the quality of the work and that of the talks (from which I got some great insights on how to improve my own talks), and I found the CSCW community to be extremely welcoming and supportive. I am looking forward to return.