The CHI2023 approach to a Hybrid Conference Format

Albrecht Schmidt and Kaisa Väänänen, CHI 2023 General Chairs
Tesh Goyal, Per Ola Kristensson and Anicia Peters, CHI 2023 Technical Program Chairs

CHI2023 will be organized as a hybrid conference aiming to provide a great conference experience for people attending onsite as well as remotely. Based on the experiences from the last years in different SIGCHI conferences we have planned largely asynchronous virtual participation with synchronous online elements.

The central aspect of our approach is that we do not want to force people to go physically to the conference in order to have a CHI publication. People should be able to publish and make their presentation available for discussion in the following venues while being remote:

• Papers
• Late-breaking work (LBW)
• alt.CHI
• Case Studies of HCI in practice

For these venues, we are implementing a hybrid asynchronous experience inspired by how we present and interact with content on social media. Concretely this will be implemented with the following elements:

• A pre-recorded and pre-uploaded video presentation will be available in the SIGCHI Progressive Web App (PWA) for each item in these venues. Each content item requires a video (also the ones that will be presented live in Hamburg).
• There will be text-based asynchronous discussion in the PWA between the audience and the authors. It is mandatory that the authors engage with questions and respond to them online.
• The content will be linked in the online program and there will be playlists providing paths through the program.

We anticipate that this makes presenting and discussing at CHI2023 more inclusive, especially for non-native speakers. For people who plan to attend the physical conference, they are expected to present their content items in person at the conference, but this is not required. The live presentations in Hamburg during CHI2023 will not be streamed or recorded and there will be time for questions from the onsite audience. No presentation videos will be shown during the onsite sessions. The decision to not record or stream the conference presentation is to avoid time zone issues and also to reduce the pressure of people presenting live. With this, presenters have more control over what they share as they can edit the pre-recorded videos.

At least one author of each content item will have to register for the conference, irrespective of whether it is online or in-person in Hamburg. Authors also have to engage with the audience in the discussions about their work, either online or, if they chose to present live at the conference, in the physical setting.

For the Interactivity venue, we focus on “interacting with authors and demonstrators” and hence we will require onsite participation for interactivity. The interactivity authors have the opportunity to provide a video demonstration for the remote participants, but this is not required.

For panels, special interest groups (SIG), Workshops, symposia, courses and competitions, we offer the organizers the choice of doing these events onsite only, hybrid/blended using Zoom and onsite, or online only using Zoom.

The keynotes will be on-site and will be streamed to the remote audience.