COMPASS
Workshops are a place for attendees of COMPASS with similar interests to interact, collaborate, and learn from each other. Please see below details of each workshop including the date, the organizers, and how to participate.
Workshop attendees must register for COMPASS 2025 at Registration 2025.
Unless otherwise noted, all workshops will run 9:00 am – 5:00 pm. Some workshops may end earlier. Please see workshop websites or contact workshop organizers for exact schedules.
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Clouded Judgment: Negotiating Data Center Siting Processes
The rapid expansion of data centers is transforming landscapes across the United States and globally, bringing with it questions of land use, energy and water consumption, environmental justice, and democratic decision-making. As cities and rural regions compete to attract (or reject) these energy-intensive facilities, the processes by which they’re sited – and the voices that shape those decisions – have become flash-points in broader struggles over sustainability and infrastructure governance. This workshop introduces a hands-on, in-person, role-based negotiation exercise that simulates a contentious permitting process for a proposed 500-megawatt data center. Participants will step into the roles of diverse stakeholders, including corporate developers, state regulators, environmental organizations, energy officials, and community residents.
The simulation is based on real-world permitting conflicts and designed to surface the complex political, environmental, and economic forces shaping infrastructure development. The goals of the workshop are to explore the complexity of data center siting and the competing forces shaping energy-intensive infrastructure, engage in a hands-on negotiation exercise where participants must make trade-offs between sustainability, economic growth, and equity, strengthen skills in stakeholder engagement, conflict resolution, and consensus-building, and to facilitate discussion on sustainable solutions for data center development and its intersection with energy policy, community benefits, and environmental impact. The workshop is designed for professionals and academics interested in urban planning, energy policy, environmental justice, (corporate) sustainability, and negotiation techniques. No prior experience with negotiation exercises is required. By the end of the workshop, participants will grain practical experience navigating multi-stakeholder negotiations on infrastructure siting, develop a deeper understanding of how sustainability, corporate interests, and local community intersect in decision-making, identify key policy levers that could make data center development more just and sustainable, and leave with a ready-to-use simulation for teaching, training, or advocacy in environmental and energy policy.
Submission Instructions
Organizers
Sanjana Paul, Tamara Kneese, Chris Rabe
Humour as Resistance: Creative Approaches to Data Center Accountability
Join us for an interactive workshop that delves into the ecological and social impacts of data centers, the backbone of AI infrastructure. As AI scales up, so does the need for data centers, which has significant environmental and social repercussions often obscured by Big Tech. This workshop aims to illuminate these impacts and foster collective organizing around the harms caused by data centers.
In the first half, we will explore the local and global implications of data centers, encouraging participants to get to know the impacts of particular data centers in place. We will present key findings on the environmental degradation and social injustices linked to data center operations, highlighting the voices of grassroots organizers who have documented these harms.
The second half of the workshop will embrace creativity as a tool for resistance. We will look at campaigns that use humour, satire, and art to convey the increasing social and environmental resource consumption taking place in data centers. Together, we will brainstorm and develop visual materials that convey these messages, transforming despair into collective agency.
Submission Instructions
We invite activists, researchers, and community members to contribute their perspectives and creativity. By participating, you will help build a network of resistance against the negative impacts of data center infrastructure, fostering a sense of community and shared purpose.
Please register using our workshop Registration form
Organizers
Eshta Bhardwaj, Han Qiao, Rowan O.A. Munson, Christoph Becker
(Re)working for Sustainable Futures: Climate Change and Platform Economies
From HCI and CSCW to labour studies and human geography, disciplines are expanding their scholarly focus to address the increasingly dire consequences of climate change. At the same time, growing attention is being directed towards the rise and ubiquity of platform companies across societal sectors, such as communication, transportation, and work. However, while both climate change and platform economies affect each another, rarely are they interrogated together. This multi-part workshop responds by building an interdisciplinary research foundation for critical studies of climate change and platform economies. Participants interrogate three themes common in conversations on climate change and discussions of platform economies, i.e., labour, data, and infrastructure. Through activities such as lightning talks, mapping exercises, and reflective discussions, participants will collaboratively produce a living syllabus and a shared database of resources and ideas for collaboration, to (re)work and design for more sustainable futures.
Submission Instructions
Please see our workshop website for more information and registration details:
Or go directly our registration form.
Organizers
Ashique Thuppilikkat, Hiu-Fung Chung, Kaushar Mahetaji, Anubha Singh, Nussara Tieanklin, Isabella Rodriguez, Jen Liu, Noopur Raval, Priyank Chandra
Towards Sustainable Community-Designed AI Systems in the Public Sector
Join us at COMPASS 2025 in Toronto, Canada! We will examine how community engagement and qualitative exploratory methods can inform qualitative model development for public sector AI. As researchers in human-centered AI, the involvement of stakeholders in health, housing, child welfare, social assistance, and education is important to resolve domain and developer conflicts, integrate sustainable practices, and engage community members in model development. Our themes include:
- Community Engagement: Developing system-level public interest AI for stakeholders, with stakeholders
- System-Level Insights: Integrating qualitative insights into quantitative model development of local AI
- Sustainability: Defining sustainable practices when informing quantitative, human-centered practices
Submission Instructions
We invite researchers, practitioners, providers, professionals, and students working in AI, as well as community members, to join us as we explore qualitative and quantitative insights when engaging community throughout AI development. We ask interested participants to submit a 250-word paragraph to hcds.uoft@gmail.com (with the subject “COMPASS workshop”), describing:
- Your research interests (field, research site)
- Your research methods (qualitative and/or quantitative)
- Your motivation for attending this workshop
Please see our workshop website for more information.
Organizers
Victoria Chui, Kelly McConvey, Erina Moon, Maya Ghai, Shion Guha
Writing for Interdisciplinary Computing Audiences
As the COMPASS community grows across fields and global contexts, many early career researchers may face challenges around the often implicit expectations of writing for an interdisciplinary computing audience—especially across disciplinary and cultural writing norms. We invite researchers who might be from the Global Majority, are new to academic writing, or new to the COMPASS community to a half-day workshop to help uncover this part of the “hidden curriculum.” The workshop will include two main components:
- a panel discussion by experts on writing norms and
- a small groups working session focused on paper submissions and other writing projects.
This workshop will result in both immediate, tangible progress on writing progress and longer-term benefits for early career researchers navigating the COMPASS and broader ACM publication landscape. (Link to full workshop proposal)
Submission Instructions
We are looking for both:*
- early career researchers (newcomers to academia, submitting to COMPASS for the first time)
- experienced mentors (late stage PhD students, postdocs, faculty members who have published in COMPASS/ACM venues and have experience with 1:1/small group mentoring)
to participate in-person or online.
Please complete the submission form by July 7th for priority consideration.
* Some PhD students can fall under both early career researchers and prospective mentors to undergraduate/masters/earlier-stage PhD students, so you are welcome to indicate you are interested in both roles and we will allocate you according to who signs up.
If you have any questions or comments, please email compass-writing-workshop@googlegroups.com
Organizers
Joy Ming, Hafeni Mthoko, Amy Z. Chen, Farhana Shahid, Vikram Kamath Cannaure
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
Designing Sustainable Indigenous Technology
Designing Sustainable Indigenous Technology
The ‘Designing Sustainable Indigenous Technology’ workshop provides a venue for interdisciplinary approaches and viewpoints to collaboratively explore and design technologies that contribute to Indigenous efforts around sustainability. This workshop will act as a “hackathon” for those interested in exploring and designing sustainable technologies for Indigenous communities. Participants will work together to identify design interventions, determine appropriate tasks, and discuss the environmental, societal, and ethical issues that can arise from technological development.
We welcome researchers, practitioners, designers, Indigenous community members, activists, and other actors who find this call relevant to their work and/or life practices. This one-day workshop will include short presentations from local Indigenous community members and design activities for Indigenous technologies that address concerns around sustainability.
Submission Instructions
We encourage participants to submit a statement of interest that does not exceed 500 words. The statement should include information about the participant’s background and reasons for wishing to take part in the workshop. The workshop organizers will review the submissions which will be selected based on their quality and relevance to the workshop themes and goals. We will do our best to accommodate specific accessibility needs participants might have.
Please submit a statement on our workshop website.
Organizers
Alex Cabral, Julia McKenna, Moeiini Reilly, Josiah Hester
Community-Driven Data Practices for Advancing Ethical and Equitable AI in Low-Resource Language Contexts
While the collection of low-resource language data for AI technology development has been a consistent challenge, the exponentially increasing need for data in the current paradigm of training large language models risks further marginalizing these languages. Even with some community-driven data collection methods developed, there are various ethical issues to be considered, given that many of these languages are spoken in the Global South where such technology development might not always benefit, or could even be potentially harmful to the communities.
This workshop invites researchers with diverse experiences—including but not limited to community-based research, low-resource language technology development, data collection and analysis—as well as practitioners, developers, and community representatives to join us in discussing potential pathways for community-driven data practices for low-resource language technologies and the ethical challenges associated with them. Our goal is for this workshop to serve as a platform for sharing ideas and fostering collaboration.
For more details, please see our website at https://community-data-practices.github.io/, or reach out to us at: comdataworkshop@gmail.com.
Submission Instructions
If you are interested in attending, please fill out our Google Form to help us prepare.
We also welcome anyone interested to walk in and participate in the discussion, whether attending in person or virtually.
Organizers
Charles Nimo, Shuheng Liu, Amy Z. Chen, Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal, Michael L. Best
Place-based Climate Data Practices
Scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists are invited to submit papers and participate in the Place-based Climate Data Practices hybrid workshop at ACM COMPASS 2025. This interdisciplinary workshop interrogates how place—as physical, cultural, spiritual, and artistic—shapes the creation, circulation, and application of climate data in pursuit of equitable climate futures. Building on prior climate data practices work, we seek to bridge HCI, STS, and justice-oriented climate action by centering place as a relational process that mediates power asymmetries, infrastructural inequities, and epistemic hierarchies.
We invite submissions addressing four themes:
- Definition: How is “place” conceptualized in climate data work? How do you engage with place-based data practices? (physical, cultural, spiritual, artistic)
- Engagement: How do issues of politics and power shape place-based climate data practices?
- Scalability: What are the broader or unintended consequences of growing and scaling infrastructures for climate data?
- Prioritization: What values do different institutions such as national agencies, universities, corporations, or community-based groups prioritize in generating climate data?
Submission Instructions
Submissions may include position papers (4–6 pages), case studies, artistic provocations, or other relevant artifacts through the link on the website by 6/20/2025.
Please submit position papers through our website.
Organizers
Taneea S Agrawaal, Sarah Cooney, Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat, Tanis Grandison, Han Qiao, Tajanae Harris, Xiao Fu, Robert Soden.
Social Agentics
This one-day ACM COMPASS workshop invites a diverse group of participants to explore how and why to design agentic systems to be situated within specific social and organizational contexts. We are particularly interested in engaging developers of agentic systems as well as scholars engaged in work that might be relevant to better understanding how the ‘social’ matters in building and evaluating agentic AI.
Together, we will explore the value of social theory and perspectives to this work, and the potential of this move to address critical issues with AI. Our aims are to develop responsible approaches for the future development of social agentics, and to collaboratively imagine socially and organizationally specific agentic AI systems in a range of different areas of practice.
We invite you to participate! Share your work and perspectives, reflect on your practices, and engage with others in the community.
Submission Instructions
Submit a position contribution that explores how we can better incorporate social knowledge, theory, and perspectives into the design, operation, and evaluation of agentic AI.
Please submit a position contribution on our website.
Organizers
Matt Ratto, Shion Guha, John Vines, Anastasia Kuzminykh, Edith Law
Workshop on Cybersecurity and Sustainability
This workshop explores the complex and often neglected relationship between sustainability and cybersecurity. A critical problem is emerging in our digital ecosystem: devices are being prematurely forced into e-waste streams due to shortsighted cybersecurity decisions and inadequate failure planning. Many products end up in landfills while still fully functional because cybersecurity choices have either permanently locked the device or deliberately induced unfixable failure modes. Through hands-on activities, case study analysis, and design challenges, teams will explore concrete opportunities for integrating sustainability into the cybersecurity design process. Participants will work in interdisciplinary groups, bringing their unique experiences and perspectives to collaborative problem-solving.
More details can be found on our website.
Submission Instructions
No papers or abstracts are required for participation, but we ask that participants complete a brief demographics and attendance survey.
If you have issues completing the survey, please send your justification and bio via email to registration@sustainsec.org
Organizers
David Barrera, Maxwell Keleher, Sonia Chiasson