Local SIGs: Getting Started

Kate Ehrlich

Focus: Getting Started

Starting Your Own Local SIG

Profile: Greater Boston SIGCHI

News and Views

For Further Information

This is the first in what I hope will become a regular column covering news and activities in local CHI chapters (SIGs). Each issue will focus on a theme and will include a profile of one local SIG.

Local SIGs represent a small but flourishing segment of the SIGCHI community. There are 11 active SIGs (up from 8 only a year ago) with another 11 in various stages of formation. Many were formed in anticipation of a SIGCHI conference in their area. Others grew naturally out of a desire to meet other local people who shared an interest in human computer interaction. Each SIG has its own local "flavor" reflected in its organization and activities. Most have monthly meetings with a featured speaker. Here is a sampling of recent meetings from a few of the SIGs:

Greater Boston: "Bringing usability into an established development organization"; "Learning interface agents".

Utah: Presentation on object-oriented analysis and design and implications for User Interface and Human Factors professionals; experience report on usability practices in a local software development project.

Ottawa: "Non-Textual Robot Programming"; "Learning to See: Issues in the Design of Visual Elements"; "Multimedia communications: Forget technology! What's the psychology?"

Focus: Getting Started

As a Participant

For people who are new to SIGCHI, attending local SIG meetings is an excellent way to learn more about the field and to find other people with similar interests. For people who are already familiar with human computer interaction and/or SIGCHI, attending a meeting is an opportunity to hear about new topics as well as catch up on the local gossip and professional developments in the area.

Meetings are usually free and open to the public. Although meeting announcements are often distributed electronically, the most reliable way to hear about meetings is to become a member of your local SIG. Dues are typically very low and include a subscription to a monthly newsletter if one is produced. In addition to announcements of meetings, newsletters frequently contain general information about local events and conferences as well as a Jobs Digest of interesting HCI jobs.

As a Volunteer

Local SIGs are an easy way to get more involved in CHI without necessarily committing to a lot of time or effort. Each local SIG has a slate of elected officers -- Chair, Treasurer and Program Committee chair all of whom must be voting members of ACM and SIGCHI. But local SIGs are always looking for people to help out with functions such as newsletters, meeting arrangements, membership, publicity or the technical program. Beyond the three elected officers, the structure of local SIGs is deliberately flexible and fluid to encourage new innovation. If you have an idea, try it out with your local SIG.

Starting Your Own Local SIG

If there is no local SIG in your area and you are interested in starting one, begin by getting together informally with people you know. Find a meeting room, say at someone's place of work and simply brainstorm amongst yourselves or hunt around for local speakers. If you want to advertise these meetings, spread the news by word of mouth and use existing mailing lists. Most companies or universities in your area will have internal mailing lists and people you know will usually be happy to forward your meeting announcements.

When you are ready to enlarge your range of activities and membership, you will need to get chartered as a local SIGCHI chapter. Once chartered you will be eligible for start-up funds and a budget, as well as being listed as an official SIG. The process of getting chartered is quite easy, straightforward and deliberately non-restrictive to give you the freedom to form a local SIG that is best for your area.

For more information about starting a SIG, contact Lisa Ernst at ACM (address at the end of this column). She has a lot of helpful information including mailing labels of all the SIGCHI members in your area, ideas about getting started and details of the procedure for becoming chartered.

Profile: Greater Boston SIGCHI

In each issue I will focus on one of the local SIGs as a mini case study. This issue profiles Greater Boston SIGCHI (GBSIGCHI). I confess that I have a personal as well as professional reason for starting with this SIG. It is the oldest and longest running of all the local CHI groups and therefore has a wealth of stories to tell. But it was also one I personally helped start in 1985 along with Wendy Mackay and a host of very dedicated volunteers who gave up many dinner hours to work together on the details of setting up a local group.

We were driven in part by the impending CHI '86 conference which was to be held in Boston. Why wait a whole year for a conference when there is a group of talented people right here in the Greater Boston area was a common theme and motivation for many of us.

We started meeting informally in a public conference room at one of our places of work. Someone found a speaker willing to stand up before a small but enthusiastic audience to talk about their work. Announcements were sent out by word of mouth and through electronic mail which got widely re-distributed. We were helped by the existence of a very active but dispersed group of CHI and Human Factors people at Digital Equipment who held regular meetings and had created an internal mailing list. Meeting announcements were also sent to all SIGCHI members in the area.

When it came time for us to think about being organized along more official lines, a group of 8-10 of us got together for a series of meetings over dinner at one of the local restaurants where our discussions would range from meeting topics to organization structure, to dues, to meeting places. Several decisions made in those early days lasted while others dropped away. It is fascinating to look back at those early decisions to see which ones have stood the test of time. For instance, it was determined early on to vary both the location and day of the week of the meetings in order to accommodate the huge variation in work and home locations. Between Cambridge, site of many of the newer and smaller high tech companies and say, Nashua, home to a large HF group in DEC was some 40 miles. Eight years later, there is still no common home for all the meetings and each successive program committee struggles with finding sites that balance those working/living inside 128 and those further out.

On the other hand, taking our cue from the different kinds of sessions at the CHI conference, we decided to vary the format of the meeting between formal speakers, demonstrations, site visits and panel discussions. This decision lasted for a while, but soon got lost in part because of the difficulty of finding the right people to organize the non-speaker meetings. Similarly, as a way of linking up with outside organizations as well as having a role for ever volunteer we instituted the position of "liaisons". This decision too, has not stood the test of time.

And then there were the more minor decisions which seem to get revisited, such as whether to hold meetings in the summer; the annual CHI Christmas party/ice cream fest; and what to bring for refreshments.

It is interesting to see what being involved in a local SIG has meant to people. Some, like Wendy Mackay, the first co-chair of GBSIGCHI, went on to become even more active in wider SIGCHI as Secretary/Treasurer and then as Chair of SIGCHI. People who get involved in local SIGs are often also involved in the parent organization or the conference. For others being involved in a local CHI group has meant continuous education, the chance to make something good happen and just have fun working with a group of people with a common purpose.

News and Views

Tutorials To Go (Viv Begg)

One of the biggest audience favorites at the annual CHI conference is the Tutorials program. Much work goes into the development of the tutorials and the potential audience is much broader than the CHI conferences can provide. The "Tutorials-to-go" program (T-T-G) is a project presently under development by ACM SIGCHI whose goal is to spread the word about CHI by arranging for tutorials to be offered outside the conference setting. This would make CHI know-how more available to an audience both within and outside the CHI community, and provide Local SIGs with a unique opportunity to provide a needed service to their members.

If you are interested in this idea, you can help in three ways: by offering your services as a local site organizer (contact Kate Ehrlich), by volunteering to help with local arrangements such as hiring a room or arranging catering (contact your Local SIG), or by helping arrange the program at the global (non-local) level (contact Viv Begg, at begg.chi@xerox.com).

For Further Information

Want more information about the local SIG in your area? The inside back cover of this issue (and all issues) of the Bulletin lists contact names and addresses for all current local SIGs as well as those in formation. (Note that many local SIGs will have had elections while this bulletin was in press and hence some of the contact names will have changed. We will publish an updated list in the next issue of the Bulletin.)

If you are interested in starting a local SIG in your area or simply curious about what would be involved, contact Lisa Ernst at ACM for a comprehensive packet of information. She can be reached at:

Lisa Ernst,
ACM Headquarters,
1515 Broadway,
New York, NY 10036 USA
Email: ernst@acm.org

If you want to reach all local SIGs simultaneously, send mail to:
local-sigs.chi@xerox.com.
This email address gets routed to all the officers at all the local SIGs.

For all other questions, send mail to me at ehrlich.chi@xerox.com. I especially welcome comments and contributions for the column, but anything about local SIGs is fair game.

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Vol.26 No.3, July 1994
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