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Vol.28 No.4, October 1996
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Vol.28 No.4, October 1996 |
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SIGCHI, the special interest group for computer-human interaction, has set for itself the following goals:
These goals have guided our decisions during the past year and will continue to guide them during the coming year.
SIGCHI concludes this review period with 4979 members (April 1996), a slight decline over the past few years. Our conferences and publications remain successful. Our finances are in excellent shape and our fund balance is over the ACM-recommended level. We continue to define new programs that will address the goals outlined above.
The SIGCHI Bulletin continued to publish four issues of about 96 pages per year. The publications we began in partnership with ACM also continue. Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) is in its third year of publication and interactions magazine just moved from four issues a year to six. About 47% of SIGCHI members subscribe to the `CHI Plus' membership plan that provides them with three conference proceedings per year. However, as the number of conference publications increases, we are considering alternate plans for distributing proceedings.
The SIGCHI Bulletin is made available electronically through http://www.acm.org/sigchi/bulletin/ after print copies are distributed, with the most current issue being available to members only.
Our conference proceedings and other publications continue to be widely recognized as having a visible and significant impact on the technical community. In addition, through the efforts of our Adjunct Chair for Standards and other SIGCHI members, SIGCHI is active in various HCI standards activities such as the ANSI/HFES HCI Standards committee, ISO TC159/SC4, ISO C159/SC4/WG5, and IFIP TC13.
We continue to support the SIGCHI Development Fund, which allows our members to request support for activities they feel advance the field of HCI and the communication of information to SIGCHI members. This year, we awarded funds to the Development Consortium of CHI Ô97 which will bring people to our CHI conference who would not normally be able to attend our flagship CHI conference. For CHI 97. the focus is on professionals from `soft currency' countries. Other groups mentioned for future support under the Development Consortium include high school web masters.
Our flagship CHI conference was held in Vancouver this year. In addition, we sponsored or co-sponsored UIST '95, DIS '95, VRST '95, Multimedia '95.
At CHI 96, eight SIGCHI Distinguished Service Awards were awarded; Don Patterson, Steve Anderson and Chris Ghinazzi for their support of our conference registration programs; Kate Ehrlich for her support of SIGCHI's local SIGS program; Nick Briggs, for his support of SIGCHI's electronic mailing lists; Bill Hefley for his work with the SIGCHI Bulletin and interactions magazine; Jim Miller for his leadership of SIGCHI, and Diane Darrow for her years of valued service to SIGCHI, our activities, and our members.
We continue the Doctoral consortium as part of the CHI conference. We are also planning three other initiatives -- a week-long workshop for a limited audience on a single HCI topic, a program to present popular CHI tutorials at times and places other than the CHI conference, and a continuing education program for HCI professionals. These programs will be further developed in the coming year.
SIGCHI is a global organization. As communities of HCI professionals are developed throughout the world, we find our activities continue to expand outside the U.S. CHI 96 was held in Vancouver and we continue to sponsor or co-sponsor conferences around the world. VRST '95 was held in Singapore and DIS '97 is planned for Amsterdam.
Our Extended Executive Committee includes members from North America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim and we hold committee meetings outside as well as within North America; our April '96 Extended Executive Committee meeting was in Vancouver; our July Executive Committee meeting will be held in France and hosted by our Executive Vice-Chair.
We have recently named the nominations committee for elections to be held in 1997; that committee consists of two members form North America, two from Europe, and one from the Pacific rim.
The trend toward multi-SIG co-sponsored conferences continues. We view this as healthy since many conference topics cut broadly across the domains of the SIGs as they are currently defined. We also view this as a challenge to understand how to effectively manage conferences with many co-sponsors.
Our membership is reasonably stable, but first-year retention is very low, but comparable with other SIGs. However, we have never concentrated on membership retention and have had no major membership promotion campaigns. This year, we initiated an extensive market research program with current members, former members, and potential members; we are currently analyzing the data. We will focus on this data at our July '96 meeting and discuss initiating member retention and member recruitment programs.
Financially, we are excellent shape. The good news is that we are more effectively managing our conference finances. The bad news is that our volunteer leadership is too busy to carry out many of the programs that we have agreed to fund.
Moving forward, we see two related challenges. The first is how to maintain a pool of volunteers capable of leading SIGCHI. This becomes more of a challenge as our members get less and less support from employers for volunteer activities. We have two Adjunct Co-Chairs for Volunteers to help address this problem. The second is how to extend the partnership between the volunteers and the professional staff that we have actively focused on and developed over the past few years. An effective partnership between our volunteers and our professional staff if crucial to our continued success and we are evaluating ways to enhance this partnership.
One additional comment on the problems of finding volunteers to stand for election. In the past two elections, we have found ourselves with only one candidate willing to stand for election. In part, this is due to widespread satisfaction with the efforts of an incumbent by a vast majority of our members. While we are pleased that ACM has worked with us to permit single candidates to stand for election in these cases, we recommend that ACM address this issue directly in the very near future.
We purchased a scanner to aid in production of the SIGCHI Bulletin.
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