When I first came to the field of Child-Computer Interaction, I was presented with two great outlets for my research: CHI and IDC. I was told CHI was the gold standard in HCI circles and I’ve had relatively good luck getting child-focused research topics into that conference. I’ve presented in the Works in Progress category, papers, and doc consortium. I think CHI is great and does what it does well.
I first went to IDC in my third year of school but had been indoctrinated into the community at CHI2009. I thought the IDC community was fantastic because it was (and still is) made up of people who care about children and the interaction research that happens with them. Where CHI had superstars, everyone at IDC was down to earth and focused on the cohesive idea of children and interaction design. I would often lament to my non-children focused colleagues at the HCIL that I liked my small conference so much better than larger ones…it was single-track so all of us had a shared experience of the state of child-computer interaction. The community gave good feedback. It was about moving the field forward and not just the individual. The group of people was learning new things and applying them in ways to make positive outcomes for children.
I know this is still true.That being said, I am worried for the future of the IDC community. Maybe because the venue is in New York or maybe because of the increased interest in this field, but we have heard time and again this year that we had record numbers of submissions. I think this is great! I think growing is in the best interest of everyone but I want to make sure that we grow correctly and that we take bold steps to continue the spirit of what has taken place over the last 12 years. However, growing can cause pains (ask my four-year old). For some, this year’s review process was less-than-stellar. I can honestly say that the reviews I received for two of my submissions were poor. And not just poor in content but poor in spirit. Poor in content can be overlooked as a new person or a busy person but poor in spirit? That’s just sad. There were a few people in the community who I shared my experiences with and realized that I was not alone. Other conferences have poor in spirit reviews…in fact, fake twitter accounts extoll the virtues of the rough review process (https://twitter.com/SottedReviewer).$I came to the conclusion that as our group grows larger, so does the ability to hid in anonymity and the ability to hinder becomes easier than the ability to help.I was upset and took time to think about this and come up with the following ideas to help IDC move forward and be the group that I know we can be.The review process needs to change. My understanding is that we have always wanted to differentiate from other big-name conferences and keep to our focused roots. In that spirit, I suggest switching from anonymous reviews to completely transparent reviews for the IDC community. Let’s face it, there are so many people who do signature things that it is sometimes easy to know who the authors are while the reviewers remain anonymous. We know we each have biases so why don’t we just get them out in the open as we review…many of us are post-modernists so we do this when we write. Also, we are a “flat” organization that understands the concepts of topics like participatory design. Many of us subscribe to the idea that everyone’s voices are equal, so why should we fall into the old trap that senior members of the community don’t want to hear from junior members and junior members are afraid to give feedback to senior members? Some publications go so far as to include the reviews, the reviewers, and the rebuttals as supplementary material with the paper.
My second suggestion to is for us to remove the artificial differences that we have assigned between papers and short papers. At IDC, a full paper is about 8 pages with the ability to go up to 10 pages while the short paper is 4 pages. The full papers are due earlier and when accepted, are rewarded with presentations to the community. Short papers are due later and are presented to the community as posters when accepted. I think this last point is the most dangerous especially when holistically
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