From the Editor: A New Editor

Steven Pemberton

A New Editor
Submissions
Internationalities

A New Editor

Our once adolescent field is coming of age with the appearance of not one but two spanking new publications on Human-Computer Interaction. Such major upheavals cannot hope but to create reverberations throughout the field: they have taken the editor of the SIGCHI Bulletin with them, and so that along with a new executive committee, SIGCHI also has a new Bulletin editor.

It is a great honour to me to have been selected for the post, and since a new editorship usually brings with it changes in style, even more so now due to the inevitable realignments that will be caused by the appearance of TOCHI and interactions, let me at once make the following pledges:

to carry on the tradition of the bulletin to the best of my abilities
to try to equal the quality that Bill Hefley has delivered to us these last few years
to handle as best I can the vast increase in my already bulky email the editorship is bound to incur
to spell check articles only according to the nationality of the authors.

As has often been said before, the Bulletin is primarily the vehicle of communication between the members of SIGCHI. Consequently, priority will continue to be given to timely reports of SIGCHI activities, with a background activity of short technical papers subject to peer review.

However, that does not mean that I am not planning to take advantage of the prerogative that a new editorship bestows in making changes to the Bulletin, albeit small changes. I wish to add to the standard columns, also with an attempt to involve you the readers more. I plan to add an opinion column, of light-hearted observations of our field. I already have 4 submissions from my own pen poised in the wings. You are invited to submit short pieces (around 750 words) to add to this supply, and to save the world from being bombarded with Pemberton's opinions.

Secondly, there will be a new column The Real World. We live in a post-Norman age, and if you are anything like me, you are constantly being confronted with (and infuriated by) interfaces -- and not just computer interfaces -- that should have been better designed. Send them in, and get them off your chest; who knows, maybe someone will even read it who is in a position to improve a later iteration.

Submissions

The SIGCHI Bulletin is produced electronically right up to the camera-ready stage. Consequently, electronic submissions are encouraged (it saves them having to be re-typed above all -- by me), by email or floppy, though paper submissions will not be turned away. I can accept submissions in a vast array of different formats: if you intend to submit something in any format apart from pure ASCII text, write to me for details of what I can accept.

Deadlines for issues of the Bulletin are traditionally three months before the month of publication. In the golden glow of naivety of not knowing yet how much work I've really let myself in for, I hope to be able to reduce this lead-time to publication, in any case for time-dependent information. Watch this space.

Internationalities

Now, I'm not going to be the sort of editor that repeats the table of contents in a different form in my editorials; on the other hand I'm not going to pledge not to do it once in a while either. So let me just remark that the material I inherited from Bill Hefley for this my first issue included sufficient material for me to be able to make a theme running through much of the issue, a theme of internationalisation and multi-culturality.

Going international is a leading theme in SIGCHI's development aims, indeed of ACM as a whole, and featuring internationalism is all the more fitting for me since, considering my location (here in Amsterdam), I'm having to learn very quickly what it means to work in a multi-national organisation: hour-long international phone calls; trying to find out what timezone someone is in, or when day-light saving changes, so that I don't go and wake them up, or so that when they ask me to phone at 10.30, I actually know what that means; the problems of getting material across the ocean in a time frame of less than a number of months; transferring money internationally; spell-checking articles written by people from different spelling regions.

It's going to be fun.

Steven Pemberton

Email: Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl

Issue
Article
Vol.26 No.1, January 1994
Article
Issue