[Asis-l] CFP: Fun, Seriously? A CSCW 2010 workshop on "fun" at work

[N Sadat Shami]

Call for Participation
Fun, seriously?
A CSCW 2010 (http://www.cscw2010.org) workshop
Savannah, Georgia, USA
To held one day during February 6-10, 2010
Position papers due: November 20, 2009
Workshop website: http://sites.google.com/site/cscw2010fun/

Fun and work are becoming intertwined in employees’ experiences. Whether through serious games, social software, best practices, or corporate culture, fun at work is shaping how workers collaborate with each other. This one-day workshop seeks to bring together a diverse community exploring research related to fun in a work context. Through position papers and interactive discussions, participants will discuss what does it mean to "have fun" in a work context, why fun is important at work, how can fun be communicated through design, and how can fun be measured.

We are interested in tool discussions, design explorations, and empirical studies of fun at work. Contributions include but are not limited to the following topics:

* Novel serious games, alternate reality games, or other game methodologies applied to work contexts
* Crowdsourcing techniques such as human computation and prediction markets to entice employees with fun tasks that generate results relevant to work
* The use of fun in organizational cultures and teams and peoples’ perceptions of it
* Examinations of the interplay and balance between fun and work
* The influence of social connections on employee’s emotional well-being in the workplace
* Social media’s effect on innovation and creativity at work

We seek to foster discussion during the workshop to help inform multiple perspectives, including those of tool-builders, community practitioners, and researchers conducting user studies. Notes from these discussions as well as accepted position papers will be posted on the workshop website.

For more details about this workshop, including related work, visit our website: http://sites.google.com/site/cscw2010fun/.

SUBMISSIONS

Researchers and practitioners are welcome to submit position papers. Interested participants will need to email a position paper to li-te_cheng [at] us.ibm.com before November 20, 2009. Each position paper should be no more than 4 pages in the standard CSCW format for Notes submissions format (See http://www.cscw2010.org/instructions.php for template). All submissions will be treated as non-archival, and can include preliminary work intended for archival publication in another venue.

All position papers must include:

* Titles, names, affiliations, email address of the authors
* Description of recent, current, or ongoing work in the domain of “fun at work”.
* The paper must address one or more of the questions:
o What is “fun at work”?
o Why is it important?
o How can it be communicated through design?
o How can we measure it?
o Short biography of the authors’ backgrounds, areas of expertise, and desired takeaways from the workshop

The organizers will review all submissions and select participants. Selection will be based on relevance to the topic of “fun at work”, how well the paper addresses the questions posed by this workshop proposal, balance of coverage, and potential for generating interesting discussion.

KEY DATES
o November 20, 2009: Deadline for position papers
o January 8, 2010: Notification of acceptance
o February 6-10, 2010: CSCW 2010 conference (1-day workshop date to be announced)

ORGANIZERS
o Li-Te Cheng, IBM Research ( contact: li-te_cheng [at] us.ibm.com )
o N. Sadat Shami, IBM Research
o Mark Blythe, University of York
o Nathan Bos, John Hopkins University