CFP: 1st Annual Algorithmacy Conference

The First Global Algorithmacy Conference

Acronym
ALGOCON 2026

Web page
https://algorithmacy.com

Location
La Brea Pitch Lake, Trinidad and Tobago

Submission deadline
15 August 2026

Notification due
Rolling (public review on the PR thread, typically within ~5 business days of submission); final decisions by September 1 2026

Final version due
At acceptance — accepted papers are published with their full review history on the public repository

Categories / keywords
Algorithmic management, Platform labor, Gig economy, Future of work, Human-AI interaction, Computer-mediated communication, Communication competency, AI literacy, Labor studies, Science and technology studies, Measurement and scale development, Global South, Caribbean studies

PART 2 — Call for Papers (paste into the body field)

The First Global Algorithmacy Conference
La Brea Pitch Lake, Trinidad and Tobago · Late October / Early November 2026
Hosted by GauntleTT in partnership with a Trinidad institutional partner (TBA)
Submission deadline: 15 August 2026 · Open review · Open access · APA 7
Submit at https://algorithmacy.com

The argument the conference convenes around

Algorithmacy is the communication competency through which a worker coordinates with another human party through an algorithmic third party. The construct names what the platform-work literature has been documenting without naming: a worker-level capacity that explains why equivalently positioned participants on identical algorithmic systems achieve divergent coordination outcomes. The competency vocabulary the field inherited from computer-mediated communication, human-machine communication, and AI-mediated communication was built around a worker on one side of a medium, partner, or sender-side agent. It does not reach the form in which the algorithm sits between two human parties and acts on inputs from both in pursuit of its own objectives.

A new coordination form has produced a new competency before, and the new competency was not a refinement of the prior one. Oracy and literacy are the historical precedents. Oracy was the competency a face-to-face speaker exercised before a listener present in the same place at the same time. Writing introduced a third structural position the speaker had not occupied — an author addressing a reader through a document that conveyed without acting — and the competency that form required was not more proficient speech but reading, writing, citing, and working through institutions that ran on text. The algorithmic form is not a more sophisticated channel through which writing happens. It is a third party with its own objectives that transforms each input as part of its operation, and the competency it requires has not yet been named in the field's existing vocabulary.

Institutions are already building curricula for the new form, and the vocabulary scholarship hands them will determine what those institutions train. Bootcamps, certification regimes, gig-worker advocacy organizations, platform-cooperative experiments, AI engineering programs, and state-level workforce-development efforts converge on what they variously call algorithmic skill, AI fluency, or platform literacy — each naming something the algorithm does or shows, and each training workers to read what the algorithm displays rather than to coordinate with another person through it.

The conference convenes the scholars, practitioners, educators, and worker advocates whose work bears on this question. It asks what algorithmacy is, how it develops, how it should be measured, how it distributes across worker populations, how it transfers across architectures, how it aggregates to teams and institutions, and what training, certification, and labor protection look like once the construct is in place.

Why La Brea

La Brea Pitch Lake is the world's largest natural deposit of asphalt — an opaque substrate that has produced the roads of empires while remaining itself unreadable to those who walked over it. The choice of venue is not metaphor for its own sake. The conference convenes in a Caribbean nation whose talent is being recruited into the global algorithmic economy under terms its workers and institutions did not author. Whether the competency develops uniformly across populations or replicates existing stratification will be answered first in the regions whose workers enter the form last. La Brea grounds the convening in that stake.

Tracks and suggested topics

Submissions are invited in the following twelve tracks. Listed topics are suggestive, not exhaustive. Authors working across two or more tracks should choose the closest fit and note the secondary track in the submission.

Track 1 — Construct and theory
The conceptual domain of algorithmacy and construct clarity; the variance puzzle; the triadic form as a coordination form distinct from dyadic precedents; discriminant position relative to CMC competence, HMC, AI-MC, algorithmic literacy, AI literacy, algorithm sensemaking, and algorithmic competency; jingle and jangle problems in the human-AI construct family; co-optation as a coordination mechanism alongside hierarchy, market, and network; competency versus literacy/sensemaking/knowledge; boundary conditions; levels of analysis; definitions, dimensions, and the nomological network.

Track 2 — Historical and philosophical foundations
Oracy → literacy → algorithmacy as ontological transitions in coordination; the Ong/Goody/Havelock lineage and the cognitive neuroscience of literacy; the New Literacy Studies critique and what survives it; print as a structural transition; algorithmic culture and cultural-epistemic rupture; contemporary articulations of the algorithmic epoch; the intermediary/mediator distinction and its limits in the triadic case; the irreducibility of triads; the sociology of paperwork and the bureaucratic file; the mediated triad as a form distinct from brokerage and tertius traditions.

Track 3 — Measurement and scale development
Item generation and content validation; discriminant validity against algorithmic literacy, AI literacy, algorithm sensemaking, and algorithmic competency; measurement invariance across cohorts, populations, platforms, and languages; longitudinal trajectory analysis; mixed-methods designs for situated competency; ethnographic methods for real-time platform interaction; the construct-identity fallacy in human-AI measurement; frameworks for triadic competency constructs; convergent validity; cohort-based replication of confirmatory factor structure.

Track 4 — Empirical settings
Rideshare, food delivery, and on-demand labor; freelance platforms and opaque-evaluation cases; AI engineering and AI-augmented IDEs; knowledge work with LLMs in legal, medical, and consulting contexts; healthcare diagnostic and triage systems; customer service under recommendation and routing; education under AI tutoring and assessment; content creation and journalism under recommender mediation; logistics, warehousing, and last-mile delivery; financial services, lending, and credit under algorithmic decisioning.

Track 5 — Antecedents
Exposure to mediated coordination as the primary engine; reflective practice and feedback interpretation; motivational engagement and the partner-versus-constraint framing; peer social support and cognitive job crafting; implicit acquisition without curriculum; prior digital exposure and transfer from other domains; mentorship, apprenticeship, and shadow learning; folk theorization and adaptive practice on changing platforms; reflection-in-action under algorithmic conditions; workplace social ecologies as antecedents.

Track 6 — Outcomes
Coordination success on measurable platforms; earnings and the worker-level economics of mediation; retention and persistence through algorithmic disruption; AI burnout as a competency rather than a workload problem; service behavior and worker-customer interaction; identification with platform work and work-identity formation; career trajectories and mobility within and across platforms; well-being, autonomy, anxiety, and isolation; resistance, voice, and political mobilization; performance benchmarking and coordination quality.

Track 7 — Distribution and stratification
Algorithmic awareness, knowledge gaps, and digital divides; gender, race, and class in platform coordination outcomes; regional and national variation in capacity development; the coding elite and the cybertariat as political-economy positions; algorithmacy as human capital versus access to developmental conditions; algorithmic stratification as a vector of labor-market inequality; the Global South and the algorithmic frontier; Indigenous, diasporic, and minoritized communities; generational differences; disability, neurodivergence, and triadic coordination.

Track 8 — Transferability
Multi-homing and platform-portable competency; architecture-specific versus architecture-general capacity; generalization of algorithmic management features across platforms; the encoding problem and the abstraction the form imposes; worker-skill-transfer mechanisms; cross-architectural learning curves and switching costs; generalized algorithmacy versus platform-specific repertoires; relation to broader sociotechnical competencies; transfer across human and algorithmic interlocutors; transfer across natural-language and code-based systems.

Track 9 — Aggregation, institutions, and curriculum
Team-level algorithmacy and collective coordination capacity; organizational algorithmacy as a firm-level capability; curriculum design — what training should actually teach; certification and credentialing regimes; the AI engineering bootcamp as a developmental setting; higher education and the algorithmic curriculum; K-12 instruction alongside oracy and literacy; workforce development under platform displacement; apprenticeship models; professional associations and learned societies.

Track 10 — Labor protections, policy, and political economy
Legal recognition of platform-mediated work; unions and worker centers; platform cooperativism and alternative ownership; state-level regulation of algorithmic management; international labor law and the cross-border platform; worker data rights and algorithmic accountability; wage transparency and information asymmetries; national AI strategies and worker development; the sovereignty question for small states; algorithmacy as a micro-foundation of organizational and national sovereignty.

Track 11 — Caribbean, Global South, and frontier perspectives
Caribbean labor markets and the platform economy; AI talent development in small island developing states; Trinidad and Tobago, GauntleTT, and the Caribbean AI engineering pipeline; diaspora networks and cross-border mediated coordination; postcolonial frameworks for reading platform capital; language, code-switching, and multilingual interfaces; Caribbean creative industries under algorithmic distribution; resource economies and the energy demands of AI; South-South cooperation on competency development; the question of an algorithmic equivalent to the New International Economic Order.

Track 12 — Critique, limits, and the conference's own commitments
The case for refining existing constructs rather than naming a new one; the case against the literacy-historical analogy; materialist and labor-process critiques; critical algorithm studies and whether competency is the right unit; phenomenological and existential readings of mediation; the limits of measurement and the case for ethnographic primacy; decolonial critiques of competency-development frameworks; the political risks of credentialing; what algorithmacy cannot reach; the conference's own complicity in convening under the conditions it studies.

Submission types

The conference accepts five submission types:
- Full paper — 6–8 pages. Empirical, theoretical, or review work.
- Research note — 2–3 pages. Work-in-progress, methodological innovations, single-case studies.
- Panel — 3–4 participants with a unifying argument and a short framing statement.
- Poster — visual presentation with a one-page extended abstract.
- Practitioner report — 2–4 pages from worker advocates, organizers, curriculum designers, and policy practitioners; reviewed for relevance and substance rather than academic form.

How to submit

Intake is via pull request against the conference's public repository. Drop a 300–500-word abstract and outline as submissions/(your-handle).md, then open a PR titled [Type] [TR.0X] Your title. Full instructions and an AI-assisted submission path are at https://algorithmacy.com. Manuscripts follow APA 7. Submissions are in English; translation support is available for presenters whose first language is not English.

Review model — open, signed, published, timestamped

This is open review. Submissions and review threads live on the public repository from the moment of intake; there is no anonymized stage. Reviewers attach their names to their assessments. Accepted papers ship alongside their full review history — reviewer reports, author responses, and the revision trail. Your pull request is a public, dated record: in any future priority dispute, the conference will support your claim based on the PR timestamp. Review is rolling, with responses on the PR thread typically within about five business days.

Awards
- Founders' Paper Award — best full paper.
- Pitch Lake Prize — most theoretically generative early-career contribution.
- GauntleTT Practitioner Award — the practitioner report that most advances the translation of algorithmacy into curriculum, policy, or worker advocacy.

Travel and logistics

The venue is approximately 90 minutes by road from Piarco International Airport. Limited travel support is available for scholars from low- and middle-income countries, doctoral students, and worker representatives; apply with your abstract. A site visit to the Pitch Lake is built into the program.

Key dates
- Submission deadline: 1 August 2026
- Review: rolling, public on the PR thread (~5 business days)
- Final decisions: [CONFIRM — suggested mid-September 2026]
- Conference: [CONFIRM] Late October / Early November 2026, La Brea Pitch Lake, Trinidad and Tobago

Contact
Roger Hunt, Bentley University — [email protected]
Web: https://algorithmacy.com

Contact Information

Roger Hunt

Contact Email [email protected] URL https://www.algorithmacy.com