Positech: The Positive Social Computing
Research Community

🌱 Designing Social Technologies for Human Flourishing 🌱

Positech is a research community exploring how social technologies can actively support human flourishing. While addressing harm is essential, we also ask: How might we design toward growth, resilience, and meaningful connection?

1. Center Human Flourishing

Design and research with human well-being, agency, and joy as central values, not just as the absence of harm, but the presence of meaningful possibility.

2. Complement Harm Reduction by Generating Meaningful Possibilities

While it is critical to prevent harm and protect users, Positech puts intentional attention to expanding the space of what is possible, to explore new directions that enrich human experience.

3. Reimagine Constraints and Defaults

Question existing assumptions about what social technologies should be. Use design and reflection to imagine alternative futures grounded in care, creativity, and context.

4. Progress Reflectively and Intentionally Through Community

Move forward through collaborative reflection that draws on diverse perspectives. By grounding action in shared insight and pluralistic dialogue, we navigate complexity with both humility and direction.

5. Cultivate Emotional and Community Solidarity

Build supportive research environments that help sustain motivation, resilience, and a sense of shared purpose, especially when facing complexity or uncertainty.

The Weekly Exchange is a 50-minute gathering for PhD students across institutions to connect, share, and support one another. Each week, one member leads a session. Sometimes they present ongoing research or invite feedback; other times they share something they care about outside of academia. Whether it's a deep dive into a social computing project or an exploration of creative passions, these sessions help us build trust, surface insights, and reimagine what it means to grow together in research.

Over time, these informal exchanges have become the foundation for workshops and collaborations within Positech. In many ways, we see the exchange itself as an open-ended exploration. What does it mean to build a loosely connected but consistent, low-stakes yet meaningfully engaged research community? How can it support the kind of work and life we're trying to cultivate as social computing researchers?

If you're interested in joining, feel free to reach out at positech.research@gmail.com with a short note about who you are, what you're working on, and how it relates to the broader themes Positech is thinking about. To help keep the group aligned and grounded, new members are brought in by consensus. Usually, that means having a personal connection with someone already in the group, often through participating in a Positech workshop. This helps us keep the space intentional and supportive as it evolves!

Proposals

• JaeWon Kim*, Lindsay Popowski*, Anna Fang, Cassidy Pyle, Guo Freeman, Ryan M. Kelly, Angela Y. Lee, Fannie Liu, Angela D. R. Smith, Alexandra To, and Amy X. Zhang. 2024. Envisioning New Futures of Positive Social Technology: Beyond Paradigms of Fixing, Protecting, and Preventing. In Companion Publication of the 2024 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 701–704.
• JaeWon Kim, Jiaying "Lizzy" Liu, Lindsay Popowski, Cassidy Pyle, Sowmya Somanath, Hua Shen, Casey Fiesler, Gillian R. Hayes, Alexis Hiniker, Wendy Ju, Florian "Floyd" Mueller, Ahmer Arif, and Yasmine Kotturi. 2025. Design for Hope: Cultivating Deliberate Hope in the Face of Complex Societal Challenges. In Companion Publication of the 2025 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 112–115.
• JaeWon Kim, Aayushi Dangol, Rotem Landesman, Alexis Hiniker, and McKenna F. Parnes. 2026. Sustainable Care: Designing Technologies That Support Children's Long-Term Engagement with Social Issues. Workshop at the 2026 ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC '26; withdrawn).
• JaeWon Kim, Lindsay Popowski, Louisa Conwill, Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Li, Meryl Ye, Jiaying 'Lizzy' Liu, Jose A. Guridi, Theia Henderson, Bingxu Han, Dennis Wang, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Susan Wyche, Yasmine Kotturi, Gillian R. Hayes, and Angela D. R. Smith. 2026. The Capacity to Care: Designing Social Technology for Sustained Engagement With Societal Challenges.

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Selected Submissions

• Casey Fiesler, The Internet is Bad for You. The Internet is Good for You. (submission for CSCW2024 workshop) [Link to Article]
• Miranda Wei, Reflections on Sociotechnical Harms for Positech. (submission for CSCW2024 workshop) [Link to Article]



(To be updated)

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Reading List (Live Doc)