Call for Papers - Special Track on Web4Good

We invite contributions to the Special Track on Web4Good of the ACM Web Conference 2026. The conference will take place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from April 13 to 17, 2026.

Today's web and social media solutions often fail to address critical societal challenges related to environmental sustainability, climate action, and vulnerable populations. The recent rise of large language models (LLMs) and other GenAI applications introduces new risks, as their computationally and energy-intensive training amplifies environmental impacts. Furthermore, these systems are frequently trained on biased and uncontrolled datasets, posing significant risks to vulnerable communities. This trend extends to GenAI agents and web agents, which present both opportunities for positive change and new challenges, such as the potential for misuse in spreading misinformation or automating bias at a massive scale.

In this context, we invite papers that research, design, develop, or apply web and social media technologies to address these issues. We are particularly interested in contributions that focus on fostering sustainable development, building healthy human societies, and supporting vulnerable or marginalized communities.

The goal of this track is to bring together researchers and developers from academia, industry, and civil society to present and debate methods for creating a web that is truly for the good of all. We seek to achieve a web that is inclusive, non-discriminative, sustainable, ethical, and open. Contributions should detail research results, tools, design techniques, and experiments that are being developed to deal with these topics. We are especially interested in how web technologies can contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and how GenAI agents and web agents can be leveraged for humanitarian response, disaster recovery, and wildlife protection. We also welcome submissions that explore how to develop new partnerships, such as Data Collaboratives, to unlock data and data science capabilities for these societal challenges.

Important Dates

  • Abstract Submission: November 23, 2025
  • Paper Submission: November 30, 2025
  • Notification: January 13, 2026
  • Camera-ready: January 25, 2026

All submission deadlines are end-of-day in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.

Scope

We welcome any submissions that address the broad goals of this Special Track and look forward to seeing the diverse ways in which authors will approach these themes. We especially encourage submissions in the following areas:

Responsible Web AI and Algorithmic Fairness:

Web Technologies for Societal Impact:

Data and Collaboration on the Web:

Special Theme: Energy-Aware Web and AI Systems for Sustainability

The 2026 edition of Web4Good introduces a special focus on Energy-Aware Web and AI Systems for Sustainability. As the web and AI ecosystems grow in scale, their environmental footprint, driven by data centers, large model training, and pervasive digital services, poses urgent challenges for sustainable development. This theme invites research on designing energy-efficient algorithms, architectures, and infrastructures that minimize carbon impact while maintaining accessibility, fairness, and inclusivity. We seek contributions that explore novel methods to monitor, optimize, and reduce energy use across the web and AI lifecycle, from responsible model training to sustainable deployment of GenAI agents and web platforms.

Submission Site

Submissions must be made through Easychair WWW2026-tracks instance (select Special Track: Web4Good).

Submission Guidelines

Authorship. The ACM has an authorship policy stating who can be considered an author in a submission as well as the use of generative AI tools. Every person named as the author of a paper must have contributed substantially to the work described in the paper and/or to the writing of the paper and must take responsibility for the entire content of the paper.

Authorship changes. The full list of authors, including the ordering, must be finalized at the point of submission. There cannot be any addition, removal, or reordering of authors after submission time. The only changes allowed are the correction of spelling mistakes or a new affiliation.

Formatting Requirements. Submissions must be written in English, in double-column format, and must adhere to the ACM template and format (also available in Overleaf). Word users may use the Word Interim Template. The recommended setting for LaTeX is:

\documentclass[sigconf, review]{acmart}.

For the special tracks, submissions are limited to 8 content pages, which should include all figures and tables, but excluding supplementary material and references. In addition, you can include 2 additional pages of supplementary material. The total number of pages with supplementary material and references must not exceed 12 pages.

Anonymity. The review process will be double-blind. The submitted document should omit any author names, affiliations, or other identifying information. This may include, but is not restricted to acknowledgments, self-citations, references to prior work by the author(s), and so on. Please use the third-person to identify your own prior work. You may explicitly refer in the paper to organizations that provided datasets, hosted experiments, or deployed solutions and tools.

Originality and Concurrent Submissions. Submissions must present original work—this means that papers under review at or published/accepted to any peer-reviewed conference/journal with published proceedings cannot be submitted. Submissions that have been previously presented orally, as posters or abstracts-only, or in non-archival venues with no formal proceedings, including workshops or PhD symposia without proceedings, are allowed. Authors may submit anonymized work that is already available as a preprint (e.g., on arXiv or SSRN) without citing it. The ACM has a strict policy against plagiarism, misrepresentation, and falsification that applies to all publications.

Ethical Use of Data and Informed Consent. Authors are encouraged to include a section on the ethical use of data and/or informed consent of research subjects in their paper, when appropriate. You and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies , including ACM's Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects (posted in 2021). Please ensure all authors are familiar with these policies.

Please consult the regulations of your institution(s) indicating when a review by an Institutional Ethics Review Board (IRB) is needed. Note that submitting your research for approval by such may not always be sufficient. Even if such research has been approved by your IRB, the program committee might raise additional concerns about the ethical implications of the work and include these concerns in its review.

Submissions that do not follow these guidelines or do not view or print properly, will be desk-rejected.

Publication and Presentation Policies

Publication. Each accepted paper will be included in the Proceedings of the Web Conference 2026. In addition, each paper is required to submit a brief pre-recorded video, which will appear on ACM Digital Library, along with the PDF.

Registration. To be included in the proceedings, every accepted paper must be covered by a distinct conference registration, e.g., two papers require two registrations, even if they have overlapping authors. This registration must be Full Conference (5-day) or Main Conference (3-day) registration, at the standard (non-student) in-person rate, payment of which must be completed by the camera-ready deadline. This registration requirement applies universally, regardless of attendance or presentation mode.

Presentation. Every accepted paper must be presented at the conference. No-show papers may be withdrawn from the proceedings.

Important update on ACM's new open access publishing model for 2026 ACM Conferences!

Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 2,700+ institutions already part of ACM Open with more institutions joining from around the world every week, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences (currently, around 75% on average across all ACM-sponsored conferences).

Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a geographic or discretionary financial hardship waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the Policy on Geographic APC Waivers and Discounts Policy and the Policy on Discretionary APC Waivers. Keep in mind that discretionary waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM. Simply sending a message to ACM indicating an inability to pay an APC is typically insufficient justification for such a waiver. Waivers are based on the specific circumstances of the author(s) requesting the waiver. ACM does take seriously into consideration the institutional affiliation of the authors and whether it is a reasonable expectation that their institution should be joining the ACM Open program. This is necessary for the long-term financial sustainability of the ACM Open model.

Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM has approved a temporary subsidy for 2026 to ease the transition and allow more time for institutions to join ACM Open. The subsidy will offer:

This represents a 65% discount off the regular APC list prices, funded directly by ACM. Authors are encouraged to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open during this transition period. This temporary subsidized pricing will apply to all conferences scheduled for 2026.

Web4Good Chairs

Contact: web4good-www2026@acm.org