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Vol.26 No.3, July 1994
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Vol.26 No.3, July 1994 |
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Every few years, ACM SIGs must go through a "viability review", in which they review the status of their membership, publications, conferences, and other activities. SIGCHI was reviewed at the March ACM SIG Chairs meeting in Phoenix, and I'm pleased to report that we were reviewed very favorably. As this month's Chairs' Corner, we're reprinting the report submitted to ACM; we hope you'll find it useful in its descriptions of past and future activities.
The past several years have been exciting ones for SIGCHI. We have seen considerable growth in both our membership and our conferences, and our activities have expanded in keeping with the increased public and professional recognition of the every-day importance of human-computer interaction. Here, I outline the current status of the organization, comment on our recent activities, and note some challenges we are facing.
SIGCHI has experienced remarkable growth, nearly doubling in the five years between 1987 and 1992 (See Figure).
This growth has stabilized in the past year or two; we exited 1993 with a total membership of 5,767, making SIGCHI the fourth largest ACM SIG (After GRAPH, PLAN, and SOFT - Ed). Over the past three years, our member retention has ranged from 83% to 89%, providing us with considerable membership stability. We are also pleased to note the development of local SIGCHI SIGs. There are currently eleven such SIGs and eight more being formed; some with memberships and monthly meetings of 500 and more; others with smaller but no less vigorous memberships, including several locations in Eastern Europe. In general, I'm proud to report that ACM/SIGCHI continues to be the primary global society for the study of human-computer interaction
SIGCHI is financially sound. As a result of a large return from the INTERCHI'93 conference and good performance from some of our smaller co-sponsored conferences, such as the International Workshop on Intelligent User Interfaces, our fund balance has been restored to the ACM recommended level. Our FY'95 budget shows an initial fund balance of US$573,000, and budgeted revenue of US$2.4 million. We expect to exit FY'95 with a fund balance of US$612,000, about 10% more than recommended.
The growth in SIGCHI membership and CHI conference attendance led to a major restructuring of society dues in 1992 and 1993. The goal was to put the various parts of society business on a "pay as you go" basis, and to unbundle some of the society benefits from basic membership. Our current budget plan operates as follows:
This model has worked well so far, although some issues have arisen around CHI Plus, and how conference activities and decisions can have a very real impact on society activities. I'll have more to say about CHI Plus later in the report.
The CHI conference continues to be the defining annual conference for the HCI community, offering a rich and varied technical program. Attendance for the conference, when held in North America, appears to be stabilizing at about 2,400. We continue to experiment with the conference in various ways. To emphasize the international nature of SIGCHI and the HCI community as a whole, we co-sponsored the INTERCHI conference in 1993, as a joint conference with IFIP's INTERACT conference. INTERCHI'93 attendance was, as predicted, lower than the typical North American CHI conference -- about 1,600 -- but we exceeded our expectations in both attendance and revenue, and, more importantly, the conference was very well-received technically. As an organization, we learned a lot from running a conference in Europe, and we are actively folding that experience back into our conference planning activities.
CHI'94 will be held in Boston, April 24-28. We are again augmenting the standard paper, panel, tutorial, and demonstration sessions with a "hands-on" Interactive Experience, in which conference attendees can get first-hand experience with innovative uses of computing technology. In addition, our experimentation with the conference format continues. We are offering a special tutorial on Saturday, which is meant to introduce the general public to the field of HCI, and we are expanding the conference's exhibits program.
As in the past, we have co-sponsored a number of smaller, more specialized conferences -- CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work), UIST (User Interface Software and Technology), IWIUI (International Workshop on Intelligent User Interfaces), VRST (Virtual Reality Systems and Technology), and the new ACM Multimedia conference. We also have entered into a number of "in cooperation" agreements with conferences sponsored by other HCI-oriented societies, such as the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
The growth in size and complexity of our conferences has increased the demands on the time and expertise of our volunteer conference management. As a result, we have restructured our conference planning committee into the Conference Management Committee, which will play a more proactive role in the training and development of conference chairs and other key conference officers, provide a greater degree of year-to-year continuity, and insure more consistency and coordination between conference and society planning activities.
The SIGCHI Bulletin continues to publish four issues per year, with 96 pages per issue. We have recently had a change in editorship, with Bill Hefley turning the Bulletin over to Steven Pemberton. We thank Bill for his many years of hard work on the Bulletin , and welcome Steven.
In addition, we are pleased to have worked with ACM staff to have created two new publications. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction ( TOCHI ) is the ACM's newest member of the Transactions series, and serves as the official ACM home for work on the software, hardware, and human aspects of people interacting with computers. In addition, we have also seen the publication of the first issue of interactions , ACM's first magazine devoted to a special subject area -- the HCI practitioner. These new publications came about through careful teamwork between SIGCHI volunteers and ACM staff, and we are pleased to have played a role in making them happen. We are continuing to nurture these publications; for instance, we mailed the first issue of interactions to all SIGCHI members in the hopes of stimulating subscriptions, and we encourage other SIGs with overlapping interests to offer similar help. interactions is a major step for ACM, both in terms of its format as a magazine and in its focus on a specialized practitioner audience. We are committed to the success of interactions , and we hope to see it lead the way for other ACM publications of this form.
Education remains a key area for SIGCHI. Many of our efforts are directly targeted at providing training for our membership and other interested people, and in establishing a strong and well-defined place for HCI in the computer science curriculum. To this end, we offer a strong tutorials program in conjunction with the CHI conference, which many of our attendees take advantage of. We also sponsor the SIGCHI Doctoral Consortium, at which a small set of especially promising graduate students present their thesis work to a panel of senior members of the HCI community and receive criticism and suggestions for future directions of the work. We have recently completed a curriculum development project, in which a family of undergraduate and graduate-level courses on HCI were proposed; copies of this report were distributed to all SIGCHI members. We have also sponsored an annual student Grants In Aid program, administered by the Sigma Xi scientific research society, which supports research into a wide range of HCI topics.
We have identified several areas in which we see special opportunities for the development of the society, and are actively exploring these through internal activities, collaborations with ACM staff, and associations with other related societies.
We are beginning to explore how we might make the SIGCHI Bulletin , conference materials, and other society documents available in electronic form. By doing so, we hope to extend the notion of "publication" to include the kinds of dynamic, interactive media that many of our members are helping to invent. There is of course a wide range of questions -- technical, business, strategic, and pragmatic -- that must be answered before this can become a regular part of our society's life, and we are working with the Publications Board to understand these questions better and work toward successful solutions.
This is the obvious broadening of the electronic publishing question: How can we make use of the Internet and other interactive information systems to broaden the availability of our members' work and, again, extend the nature of the work products we distribute? Many of the questions relevant to electronic publishing are relevant here as well, and we are working with the Publications Board and ACM network services to define an appropriate strategy.
We are looking to make better use of acm.org for the electronic information steps we can take. SIGCHI has always made heavy use of electronic mail and distribution lists, and we have greatly benefited from the generosity of Xerox Corporation in supporting a centralized set of mail forwarding addresses. We are beginning to migrate those lists to acm.org, and are beginning to explore how we can best move some of our other electronic resources there as well.
Meanwhile, some informal access to SIGCHI activities already exists on the Internet, especially through ftp, Gopher, and Mosaic/World-Wide Web. People with Mosaic can obtain more information on SIGCHI activities through the following sources:
We cannot take our membership for granted; to remain a vital organization, we must continue to understand our membership and their needs, and work to meet them. To this end, we are planning a membership survey, and are preparing a SIGCHI brochure to recruit new members. We are also hoping to establish better relationships with other SIGs and non-ACM organizations with interests in HCI, and explore ways of sharing and developing our interests and resources. One step along this path is a plan to share newsletter columns; we invite other SIGs to exchange columns in our respective newsletters on our activities and encourage our respective members to be aware of and participate in the activities in the other SIG. Please contact me if your SIG is interested in arranging such a sharing of columns.
We are developing a program in which a collection of tutorials from the annual CHI tutorials program might be offered at other times and locations than just the CHI conference. We see this as a way of broadening our educational impact, helping spur the development of local SIGs, and increasing society revenues. The logistical demands of this program are great; we are taking care to find the right person to complete the design of this program and begin its implementation.
SIGCHI is not without its challenges. Not surprisingly, these issues run roughly parallel to our strengths.
One of SIGCHI's strengths is its highly diverse membership: we draw compiler writers, psychologists, artists, interface designers, hardware designers, and everything in between. Covering this breadth in enough depth to insure value to our membership is a continuing challenge, and we must always be monitoring our success or shortcomings in this area. We must also develop this membership, draw more of them into the volunteer ranks, and provide them with the training and experience they need to be successful. This is especially true in Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world, where the opportunities to build vital HCI communities are especially great. Finally, our future depends on our success at bringing students into the HCI field and into SIGCHI; we need to monitor the packages offered to our student members, and be certain that their needs are being met.
SIGCHI is in a leadership position in the HCI field, but it is not the only organization with interests in HCI. As noted earlier, we need to understand how we relate to these other organizations: how and where we can work together effectively, and where we are best off working independently. One role that SIGCHI can serve here is that of a starting point for new, specialized SIGs and other societies; it is right that it has this role, but we must make sure that there is always a core set of exciting, valuable work going on within SIGCHI.
Just as SIGCHI is growing to take on a broader perspective of HCI, so the CHI conference has also grown to present this perspective. This has strained the conference and often the attendees: keeping track of everything happening at CHI can be an overwhelming task. This is again a question of balance: we need to learn how to structure the conference so that we capture the richness of the field but also present it in a way that is clear and understandable.
We also need to learn how to structure the conference and SIG organizations so that the decision-making processes of both organizations are coordinated. This is where CHI Plus has been problematic for us. A conference's decision to expand the size or nature of the conference proceedings has an immediate impact on the society's budget, since it is the SIG as a whole that is responsible for mailing the (now enhanced and more expensive) proceedings to the CHI Plus members. The cost of the CHI Plus option could be re-priced to reflect the greater costs, but the change in cost would likely lag the decision to expand the proceedings and impact the SIG, and constantly changing prices will send confusing messages to members. This is a difficult question, and we are actively searching for answers.
We now have the luxury of a family of HCI-related publications within ACM: the SIGCHI Bulletin , TOCHI , the annual CHI proceedings, and interactions . However, it will take some time and effort for these publications to sort each other out, so that readers and authors have a clear understanding of what sorts of articles are "right" for which publications. For instance, in previous years, articles in the Bulletin often covered practitioner topics that are clearly relevant to interactions ; similarly, important theoretical issues that might be written up in a short form for the CHI conference can now be presented in more detail in TOCHI . This is a natural evolution, but it will do us well to monitor and manage it as much as we can.
We are committed to working with ACM staff to nurture and grow interactions . This is a new kind of publication for a specialized audience, and we need to make sure that the two find each other. Starting a new publication is always difficult, since the publication is caught in the chicken-egg problem of low subscription counts causing high subscription prices, which holds down subscription counts. We are very pleased with how interactions has begun, and we want to be sure that its success continues.
Finally, as noted before, we need to understand how to make use of electronic publishing and information technologies in ways that are consistent with the long-term health of the society's finances. Should we make some part of the society's publications available through on-line means as a loss leader for joining the society, or will that simply give away the only product that our members might be willing to pay dues to receive? We can take some comfort in the thought that information providers the world over are wrestling with exactly these questions; we hope we can learn from these people, and make sound choices in our handling of our members' work.
As always, thanks are due to the ACM staff with whom we work. We especially need to thank Diane Darrow for her tireless efforts on our behalf, throughout all parts of our activities. One of the best things that Diane has done for us lately was to set up a one day meeting for us at ACM headquarters, where we were able to spend a great deal of time with the staff, understand how ACM works, and how we can work together most effectively. This will pay off for us in many ways in the future -- we may make it a regular part of our Executive Committee meeting plans -- and I would encourage other SIGs to do the same.