As the year comes to a close, we would like to pause and reflect on what 2025 has brought. It has been an inspiring and rewarding year for our community. Here are some highlights:
- This year, Gerhard Fischer was awarded the IISI-EUSSET Lifetime Achievement Award for 2025 for outstanding contribution to the CSCW corpus of exploring how computer artefacts could contribute to the quality of life and specifically to the quality of education for all human actors, by touching upon areas of interdisciplinary socio-technical environments, including software ergonomics, domain-oriented design environments, critiquing systems, assistive technologies, computer-supported collaborative learning, creativity-enhancing environments, meta-design, and cultures of participation.
- We were fortunate to have hosted an inspiring ECSCW 2025 conference in the beautiful city of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. We would like to thank Tom Bartindale, Clara Crivellaro, Vasilis Vlachokyriakos, and the organizing committee, as well as all those in our community who contributed to the conference’s success. Special congratulations also go to Ben Wilson, Chiara Natali, Matt Roach, Darren Scott, Alma Rahat, David Rawlinson and Frederico Cabitza, winners of this year’s David B. Martin Best Paper Award for the paper “Dimensions of Human-Machine Combination: Prompting the Development of Deployable Intelligent Decision Systems for Situated Clinical Contexts”.
- In August, we organized the 9th International Summer School on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: Foundations, Methods, and Technologies in Vienna, Austria. Many thanks to Babak Farshchian, Kathleen Pine, Khuloud Abou Amsha, Lars Rune Christensen, and all our great lecturers for making this summer school unforgettable for all the young researchers in our community. We had the opportunity to discuss the theses of 22 PhD students with us, who also learned about our approaches and concepts in order to widen their views. On this occasion, we were delighted to welcome Mark Ackerman and Kathleen Pine for additional talks that further enriched our students’ understanding.
- This has been a particularly eventful year for the EUSSET steering committee. We continued our monthly online meetings, strengthening our collaborative spirit and carrying this momentum into 2026. Our retreats provided space to address more complex topics and to jointly shape our future services and organizational structure as an association. In addition, we substantially expanded our digital library and established working groups to better support the EUSSET community. Our EUSSET Colloquia continued to serve as a space for active exchange and discussion within the community. By the way, you may recall that ECSCW has changed its name to the “EUSSET Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work,” inviting colleagues from around the world to our conferences.
Finally, we would like to remind you of some exciting events to look forward to in 2026:
- ECSCW 2026 in Munich from June 29th to July 3rd
- EUSSET Summer School 2026 in Troyes from August 24th to August 28th
If you are interested in joining us, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year!