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Vol.29 No.4, October 1997
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Vol.29 No.4, October 1997 |
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Mike Atwood, Chair (non-voting)
Guy Boy, Co-chair
Clare-Marie Karat, Vice Chair for Finances
Gene Lynch, Vice Chair for Conferences
Jim Miller, Past Chair
Barbee Teasley, Vice Chair for Communications (minutes)
Marian Williams, Vice Chair for Operations
Robin Jeffries, Member, Advisory Board
John Karat, Member, Advisory Board
Richard Anderson, Adjunct Chair for Local SIGs
Diane Darrow, Program Director, ACM
Trish Irving, ACM
Steven Pemberton, Editor-in-Chief, SIGCHI Bulletin
Rosemary Wick Stevens, Adjunct Chair for Public Relations
(These minutes were created on May 28, 1997, and approved by a vote of 4-0-0 on June 25, 1997.)
The minutes of the January and February, 1997, EC meetings were voted on and approved by a vote of 7-0-0. As per the charter, committee votes that had taken place during conference call meetings were confirmed publicly via roll call.
Director Darrow notified ACM that she is resigning, effective the end of April. A search is currently on to find a replacement. The search is being led by Donna Baglio, of ACM.
The committee expressed a number of concerns about the process to date. The primary concern is that the EC should be closely involved in defining the criteria and making the selection of the candidate. Another concern is that the program director be assigned full time to SIGCHI. (Currently, Darrow deals with a number of SIGs.) The whole issue is particularly time-critical, as there are a number of pending CHI-conference-related issues that need immediate attention. A discussion was held regarding the duties of the Program Director, and the characteristics of the ideal candidate.
It was agreed that Atwood would communicate our concerns to the ACM Executive Committee, and work with them to set up action items.
In order to continue our growth and better serve our members, SIGCHI needs to have a clear understanding of how we currently relate to non-North American countries, and what the issues are. In general, there is a perception that SIGCHI and ACM are primarily US-centered groups.
A number of countries outside of North American have national societies with HCI focus areas within them. Others have societies which solely focus on HCI. In other cases, countries are looking for help in forming HCI groups. National societies have an advantage in working with these forming groups, because they are more local, and can understand their needs. The United Kingdom has the largest group of HCI professionals outside of the US. They are interested in building closer ties with us, but do not wish to merge.
Because ACM does not have numerous activities aimed at building an international base, we need to work on it ourselves. We need to insure that non-U. S. members do not feel they are being `taxed' to provide benefits that are available only to US members.
J. Karat and Boy reported on the outcome of a SIG session they held at the CHI 97 conference, along with Dave Novick. Among the suggestions arising from this session were: creation of an international advisory board, a plan for cooperating societies, a plan for cooperative international research, SIGCHI sponsorship of traveling tutorials, CHI conference tutorials on different research traditions, local SIG support, enhanced review guidelines and calls for participation which take into account cultural and language differences, submission mentors, and web page translation.
The committee agreed to create an international advisory board. J. Karat moved (Jeffries seconded) that:
The SIGCHI Chair will appoint a chair to create an international advisory task force. The task force is to provide the SIGCHI EC with recommendations for actions in support of SIGCHI's internationalization efforts, including plan items from the CHI 97 internationalization SIG. SIGCHI will provide a budget of $1000 from the Chair's discretionary fund for conference calls. The report should be provided to the EC by Oct. 31, 1997.
The vote was unanimous in favor (7-0-0). Boy was appointed as chair.
Keith Instone has been hired as a part-time ACM employee in the position of web coordinator. He will oversee the SIGCHI web site, including policy and content.
Miller reported that the SIG Board of ACM has approved a slate of candidates for the upcoming SIGCHI election. The slate is:
Chair / Co-Chair: Mike Atwood and Guy Boy (unopposed)
Vice-Chair of Communications: Cathleen Wharton, Barbee Teasley
Vice-Chair for Conferences: Gerrit van der Veer (unopposed)
Vice-Chair of Finance: John Karat, Jean Scholtz
Vice-Chair for Operations: Bob Mack, Timothy Mills
Vice-Chair for Publications: Dan Olsen, Kjeld Schmidt
Monique Chang, ACM, is preparing the official mailing to the membership announcing the slate (by April 15). The mailing will inform the membership that additional candidates must notify ACM of the intent to petition by April 30. The actual petitions must be received by May 15. She will contact candidates to get biographical information and position statements. This information will be sent to members in the middle of May in a second mailing, along with ballots. The election will be completed and the results announced by July 1.
The Election Committee approached many members as potential candidates. A number of those approached felt they had no experience being involved in the running of SIGCHI, and did not wish to run. One solution is to get members involved at an intermediate level. This would necessitate having ACM staff support and contacts for them, as well as contact with the EEC.
The EC feels that we are not making as effective use of volunteers as we might. The current problems of involving volunteers were discussed. Some of the problems noted were: the difficulty of matching volunteers to jobs, dealing with distributed groups, no leader for volunteer involvement, lack of staff support, no obvious reward for volunteers, lessening support of volunteerism by employers, competition with the CHI conference for volunteer time, and failure to fully utilize the Adjunct Chairs of the EC.
The committee brainstormed a variety of solutions to the identified problems. One action item identified is to create a job description for a volunteer to take on some of the solutions identified by the EC and make them happen. To enlist the aid of local SIGs in addressing the issue of volunteerism, Anderson will coordinate a meeting of CHIFOO with the EC meeting in Portland, OR, in early August. Additional aspects of the issue will also be discussed in more detail at the August meeting.
The new SIGCHI brochure has been published and is available for distribute through ACM headquarters. The EC was encouraged to provide comments to Wick Stevens. The Volunteer Recognition Reception at CHI 97 was a success. In the future, there needs to be more clarification of who is invited and qualified to attend. About 15 to 20 media representatives attended CHI 97. They will be offered complimentary memberships in SIGCHI. This will assure that they continue to receive information about SIGCHI and HCI, and further our public relations. The Student Kits project is close to fruition. The components of the kits have been assembled, and the mailing lists are ready to go.
Boy outlined for the committee a conference he is organizing on HCI issues in aeronautics. It is possible that the conference could be done in cooperation with SIGCHI, or even as a sponsored conference. The matter needs to be forwarded to the Conference Management Committee for consideration.
A new conference, Policy '98, has been created. It will deal with ethical issues and U.S. policies on computers and computing. Lynch will contact the organizers to ascertain if they are interested in obtaining `in cooperation' status with us.
The EC discussed the flow of communication among the EC, the EEC and the membership. We need to be more explicit in indicating what information needs to be kept confidential within the EC, and for how long. We need to keep fellow EC members informed on activities that are related to SIGCHI policy and management.
As we continue work towards becoming a society, we need to work especially hard to keep the members well-informed. Using email via chi-announcements would be a good way to augment and point to what appears in the Bulletin.
The committee unanimously commended Steven Pemberton and Alan Edwards and the rest of the CHI 97 Conference Committee for a successful CHI conference.
The committee also commended Darrow's outstanding commitment to SIGCHI and expressed their heartfelt thanks for all that she has contributed.
The next meeting of the EC will be a conference call on Wednesday, April 30, at 11:30 EST, 3:30 UTC. There will not be a conference call on July 30. The August EC meeting will be held August 1-3 in Portland, OR, USA. Both retiring and incoming EC members will attend. The retiring members participate only in a hand-off session.
Mike Atwood, Chair (non-voting)
Guy Boy, Co-Chair
Clare-Marie Karat, Vice Chair for Finances
Jim Miller, Past Chair
Marian Williams, Vice Chair for Operations
Robin Jeffries, Member, Advisory Board (minutes)
John Karat, Member, Advisory Board
Pat McCaren, ACM
Keith Instone, Information Director
Jean Scholtz, Candidate for EC
Rosemary Wick Stevens, Adjunct Chair for Public Relations
(These minutes were created on June 5, 1997, and approved by a vote of 4-0-0 on June 25, 1997.)
Since beginning his work for SIGCHI, Instone has been primarily working on projects directly related to the CHI 98 conference. His goal has been to build for reuse. For example, he has built a tool to help manage mailing lists. He is also working on infrastructure for a reviewer database. Another project has been to create and maintain a consistent CHI conference format for publications, which will be accessible via the web. Currently, there are several so-called `standard formats', which causes confusion. The EC requested that Instone come up with a plan for handling the movement of email aliases for individuals from xerox.com (e.g., lastname.chi@xerox.com) to acm.org.
Trish Irving, of ACM, who was handling conference management for CHI, has resigned. The decision has been made to move the major duties of conference management outside of ACM. The firm of Conference & Logistics Consultants (CLC) will be handling these duties, with an initial commitment of two years. Paul Henning and the CLC are seen as a strategic partner for SIGCHI. Paul Henning will attend the face-to-face EC and CMC (Conference Management Committee) meetings as appropriate to learn more about SIGCHI, and to understand the organization's goals so that the CLC can facilitate the instantiation of the goals in the CHI 98 and CHI 99 conferences.
One candidate for Program Director has been interviewed and offered the position at ACM. We should be hearing soon as to whether the candidate will accept the position.
John DeLorenzo and Darren Ramdin have committed to finalizing the CHI 98 conference budget. The contract with the convention center is almost complete.
SIGCHI has been asked to be a cooperating society for the ACM Policy 98 conference. The Conference Management Committee will handle this item, as per their function.
Ballots for SIGCHI election to the Executive Committee have been sent to SIGCHI members. The committee was asked to encourage SIGCHI members to vote. A return of at least 10% of membership ballots is needed to make the election valid. Miller will post a notice on chi-announcements.
About twenty people have indicated they are interested in participating on the International Task Force recently conceived by the EC. The representatives come from a number of countries, including countries in Asia and Europe. Two different conference calls have been scheduled for June. The reason for two different calls is to deal with time zone differences.
ACM is planning to create a digital library, which would place all publication materials on-line and available for a flat fee. Concern was expressed about the impact this would have on revenue and how the revenue would be distributed. The current plan is that only conferences that are a year old will be distributed. However, SIGCHI now puts the CHI conference proceedings on line within 6 months. In addition, the CHI proceedings are done in HTML. The ACM library will initially be in PDF format. A single format is preferable, as there is a lot of work involved in converting between the two formats. Jeffries will craft a motion on SIGCHI's position on the digital library to present to the EC.
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Vol.29 No.4, October 1997 |
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