The Real Costs of Collaborative CSS: Infrastructure, Coordination, and the Prosocial Ranking Challenge — Interview with Ceren Budak

The Real Costs of Collaborative CSS: Infrastructure, Coordination, and the Prosocial Ranking Challenge — Interview with Ceren Budak

Doing large-scale collaborative computational social science research well is brutally expensive, slow, and hard to coordinate — and most of the field pretends otherwise. In this interview recorded at the 2026 Tech for Open Minds Annual Conference, Ceren Budak (School of Information, University of Michigan) gives an unusually honest account of what it actually takes: the difficulties of outcome construction, the reliance on toxicity scores, the engineering lift of content filters, and the coordination challenges of multi-stakeholder research. She discusses the prosocial ranking challenge as a genuine structural innovation for addressing these problems. This is the interview to forward to your PI or program officer.