Last changed 29 May 2002 ............... Length about 900 words (6000 bytes).
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Request for 30 word description

Dear author
This is a request for you to send us a 30 word description of the value of your paper to the community. (This is the form of this request used on authors of papers. I think I'll leave it in that form for reference and possible other use. But if you are a workshop author, please just adapt this request to your case; bearing in mind these 30 word summaries will, in some forms, put workshops and papers etc. adjacent to each other, sorted by topic or date ...)

Longer than the title and the keywords but shorter than the abstract, it is also meant to get more directly at, not the conclusions of the paper, but what kind or type of paper it is, and why people might want to read it. In order to facilitate the writing of these descriptions we would like you as authors to provide an initial 30 word description however, these descriptions may be edited by the committee in order to obtain consistency across all events.

In drafting your 30 words, then, the aim is to let potential readers classify your paper instantly. Anything that lets them do that is good. As an initial guideline, we suggest covering the following 3 implicit questions:

  1. What area / topic is this about e.g. haptic interfaces, cscw, usability methods, etc.
  2. What method is the paper based on e.g. describes a software design, case study of use, reports controlled experiments, describes a design method and experience of its first use, theoretical or conceptual analysis, "unusually for a conference, this paper is essentially a review of a stream of work over the last 10 years", etc.
  3. How widely accepted this is likely to be e.g. "continuing the subfield of location sensing applications", "within the broad field of heuristic evaluation, this implies that most previous studies have been too flawed to be useful", "a controversial paper that seems/is designed to inspire interest and loathing in equal measure depending on the reader".

We expect these 30 words to be useful to conference delegates in deciding what papers they want to hear or read (and even whether they come to the conference at all), but also useful to the community as a whole in becoming more articulate about the different kinds of value a paper has to others.

We intend to put them on the website, in the magazine Interfaces before the conference to build up enthusiasm, and in the final programme.

This is an exploratory trial, adapted from an innovation in the CHI conference: whether it is maintained will depend on how it goes this year. Your comments will be useful.

Some examples...

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