ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI 2021)

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Workshop program

Call for Papers

The 11th Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '21) will bring together researchers and practitioners who study and develop technologies that affect digital speech online. FOCI will examine three broad areas of digital speech: censorship, surveillance, and disinformation/strategic communication. We solicit contributions from the fields of computer science, the social sciences, and law, and we welcome interdisciplinary submissions.

The goal of FOCI is to catalyze new research directions and discussions that might not be mature or established enough to appear at conventional computer science measurement and security conferences. We aim to foster the development of early-stage work across disciplines. We recognize that control over online speech has become inherently interdisciplinary, so that studying these problems often involves adopting a holistic, interdisciplinary perspective.

All papers accepted to FOCI'21 will be published as open access under the ACM Digital Library free of charge to the authors.

Topics of Interest

We welcome studies on all aspects of digital speech control. This includes (but is not limited to) the measuring, building, and deploying of:

• Anonymity systems
• Censorship systems
• Circumvention systems
• Content moderation systems (e.g., social media)
• Corporate or government surveillance
• Digital propaganda
• Disinformation and misinformation online
• Laws and policies governing communication and surveillance
• Press freedom
• Societal and behavioral impacts of censorship and surveillance

Submission Instructions

Papers must be submitted via the submission site, and can fall into one of two tracks:

Technical Track: Submitted papers must be no longer than six pages (excluding references and appendices), based on the standard SIGCOMM format. Please note, however, that reviewers are not required to read appendices, and papers should be able to stand on their own without them. More specifically:

• Papers must be formatted for printing on Letter-sized (8.5" by 11") paper. Paper text blocks must follow ACM guidelines: double-column, with each column 9.25" by 3.33", 0.33" space between columns. Each column must use 10-point font or larger, and contain no more than 55 lines of text.
• If you are using LaTeX, you may make use of this template for ACM conference proceedings. With the older versions of this template you must add "10pt" to the documentclass command to meet the submission requirements. The current template sets 10pt by default. (Unlike the official template, it only includes an example for conference proceedings.)

Law/Social Science Track: Papers submitted in this track must be no longer than 15 pages based either on the standard SIGCOMM format (as above) or, if preferable, 15 single-spaced pages using normal 8.5" x 11" format pages. Shorter papers are encouraged where possible, though organizers will be more flexible on page count with this track, granting exceptions on a case-by-case basis. References will not count towards the page limit. This track aims to encourage submissions from fields such as law, economics, and public policy, where longer articles are traditional.

Technically-focused papers submitted to either track may be desk-rejected if they exceed the page limit for technical papers.

FOCI '21 will be double-blind, and so all papers must be properly anonymized; no author names or affiliations may appear on the title page, and authors should avoid revealing their identities in the text. When referring to your previous work, do so in the third person, as though it were written by someone else. Only blind the reference itself in the (unusual) case that a third-person reference is infeasible. Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered. Accepted submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the FOCI '21 website; rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential.

Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, or plagiarism constitutes dishonesty or fraud. Note, however, that we expect that many working papers accepted for FOCI '21 will eventually be extended as full papers suitable for formal academic publication and presentation at future conferences, and such papers are eligible for submission to FOCI.

Papers that do not comply with the submission requirements, including length and anonymity, may be rejected without review.

Please do not hesitate to contact the program co-chairs at foci21chairs@cs.umd.edu if you have any questions about the submission process or other aspects of FOCI '21.

Important Dates

• May 13, 2021
  May 20, 2021, 11:59:59pm PDT

  Submission deadline

• June 11, 2021

  Acceptance notification

• July 2, 2021

  Camera-ready deadline

• August 27, 2021

  Workshop day

Program Committee

• Program Chairs

• Dave Levin

  University of Maryland

• Eric Wustrow

  University of Colorado Boulder

• Program Committee

• Alan Mislove

  Northeastern University

• Alberto Dainotti

  CAIDA, UC San Diego

• Amir Houmansadr

  UMass Amherst

• Anita Nikolich

  University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

• Arturo Filastò

  Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)

• Blase Ur

  University of Chicago

• Cecylia Bocovich

  Tor Project

• Dan Wallach

  Rice University

• Drew Springall

  Auburn University

• Kevin Bock

  University of Maryland

• Liang Wang

  Princeton University

• Masashi Crete-Nishihata

  Citizen Lab

• Michael Carl Tschantz

  International Computer Science Institute

• Nguyen Phong Hoang

  Stony Brook University

• Philipp Winter

  Brave Research

• Rachee Singh

  Microsoft Research

• Rachel Greenstadt

  New York University

• Ram Sundara Raman

  University of Michigan

• Reethika Ramesh

  University of Michigan

• Rishab Nithyanand

  University of Iowa

• Rob Jansen

  U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

• Roger Dingledine

  Tor Project

• Roya Ensafi

  University of Michigan

• Tariq Elahi

  University of Edinburgh

• Will Scott

  Protocol Labs