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Vol.30 No.3, July 1998
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Vol.30 No.3, July 1998 |
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Once every four years, SIGCHI prepares a Program Review and presents it to the leadership of the other ACM SIGs. These Program Reviews are the primary way in which SIGs can learn what interests other SIGs support, what activities they are involved with, etc. We thought it would also be worthwhile to share our last Program Review with you since it provides an overview of SIGCHI and SIGCHI's activities. We especially invite your participation in defining, conducting, and evaluating these and future activities.
Best regards
Mike & Guy
The past several years have been exciting ones for SIGCHI. We have seen considerable growth in our conferences. Activities continue to expand in keeping with increased public and professional recognition of the everyday 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.
During the past review period, the goals of the SIGCHI Executive Committee have been to:
SIGCHI is governed by an Executive Committee elected by the SIGCHI membership. The positions include a Chair, an Executive Vice-Chair, a Vice-Chair for Communications, a Vice-Chair for Conference Planning, a Vice-Chair for Finance, a Vice-Chair for Operations, a Vice-Chair for Publications, and ex officio, the Past Chair, and the Bulletin Editor. The Extended Executive Committee includes an Advisory Board and Adjunct Chairs. Currently, there are three (3) members of the Advisory Board who have a third-vote each and represent International, Local SIGs, and Education issues. SIGCHI has two (2) Adjunct Chairs who have no vote. These individuals represent the areas of public relations and organizational development.
Decisions and policies related to our conferences are developed by the Conference Management Committee and approved by the Executive Committee. The Conference Management Committee is chaired by the Vice-Chair for Conference Planning and has an additional five appointed members, all of whom have previous conference management experience. Additional members are the SIGCHI Program Director and the principal contractor responsible for logistics for our major annual CHI conference.
The Executive Committee communicates regularly by monthly teleconference call and holds three face-to-face meetings per year. The Conference Management Committee meets by monthly teleconference and holds two face-to-face meetings per year.
Overall, SIGCHI's membership is slowly declining and considerable efforts to reverse this trend are being implemented. Our retention efforts are initially being targeted at first-year members who each receive a personalized welcome letter and information regarding the virtues of being a member of the SIGCHI community. During this quarter, members who fail to renew will also be receiving a follow up letter reminding them to renew and reiterating the benefits of SIGCHI membership. An exit survey will be sent to all SIGCHI members who choose not to renew in an effort to focus our attention on areas to be improved or eliminated.
| FY | Total Membership | % change from previous year | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY'94 | 5428 | -5.88 | 62% |
| FY'95 | 5159 | -4.96 | 59% |
| FY'96 | 5023 | -2.64 | 58% |
| FY'97 | 4809 | -4.26 | 55% |
| FY'98 | 4633 | -3.66 | 54% |
SIGCHI is financially sound. Our overall budget has increased by almost $1,000,000 since 1991. In FY97, actual surplus was $328,496, actual revenues were $2,721,734 and our expenses were $2,393,238. Our Fund Balance was $1,099,296, $466,631 over the required balance of $632,665. This surplus has been generated over the past few years by profits from our conferences.
Our current budget plan operates as follows:
The annual CHI conference continues to be the definitive forum for members of the HCI community to gather for the exchange on the latest technical developments in the field. Attendance has become increasingly more international and is holding steady at approximately 2,400 participants. In 1997, a development consortium was initiated which brought individuals from soft currency countries to the conference. In 1998, there will be select teachers from secondary schools brought in who would ordinarily be unable to attend the conference. The primary focus continues to be the technical program and the tutorial sessions. CHI 98 will be held on April 18-23 and is expected to generate record attendance as the initial registration figures have proven to be higher than ever.
In an effort to allow our volunteer community to focus on programmatic issues, professional contractors have been hired to handle much of the operational issues for CHI conferences. The Conference Management Committee (CMC) is an all-volunteer advisory board chaired by the Vice-Chair for Conference Planning. Their mission is to set policies which have cross-conference implications. It is in the process of revising its charter so that it can continue to provide the best support to current and future CHI conferences while insuring more consistency and coordination between conference and organizational planning activities.
SIGCHI also has an extensive list of sponsored, co-sponsored, and in-cooperation conferences. The sponsored and co-sponsored conferences include CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), co-sponsored with SIGGROUP; DIS (Designing Interactive Systems); ESP (Empirical Studies Workshop); IUI (Intelligent User Interfaces), co-sponsored with SIGART; UIST (User Interface Software Technology), co-sponsored with SIGGRAPH, and VRST (Virtual Reality Software Technology, also co-sponsored with SIGGRAPH. The in-cooperation conferences vary from year-to-year and are sponsored by other HCI organizations, such as the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
The SIGCHI Bulletin continues to publish four issues per year, with approximately 96-112 pages per issue. We will be undergoing a change in editorship, with Steven Pemberton turning the Bulletin over to a yet-to-be-named editor. We thank Steven for his many years of hard work on the Bulletin.
SIGCHI continues to support the ACM publications program. In particular, it provides support to the Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) and interactions. These publications are included in special mailings to teachers of HCI who request them for their students.
SIGCHI supports the Digital Library project and has placed its previous years' proceedings there. The SIGCHI Bulletin is also published on-line.
Education is a critical area for SIGCHI members. 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. The tutorials program, which precedes the technical program at the CHI conference, is an excellent example of this. 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. We are considering a Tutorials to go program where specific tutorials are presented to local SIGs or similar groups.
The CHIkids program was initiated in 1996 to emphasize the importance of technology in children's lives and has become a permanent fixture at CHI conferences. It functions as an on-site computer camp rather than a day care program. CHIkids is supported by caregivers attending the conference and, in the future, we will be seeking additional funds from corporate sponsors to underwrite the costs of administering the program.
We continue to identify areas in which we see special opportunities for the development of our society. Below, we discuss both those initiatives mentioned in our last program review and those that have received special attention since the last program review. As long as they remain consistent with our goals, we expect that all these initiatives will continue to evolve and that effort will be allocated to them.
In the last SIGCHI Program Review, we identified five areas in which we saw special opportunities for the development of our society. Activities and progress in each of these areas is summarized below.
Electronic Publishing. Our goal is to make our publications available in electronic form and, by doing so, to extend the notion of "publication" to include the types of interactive media that many of our members are helping to invent. We see progress in two areas. First, after some early experiments with CD-ROM, the proceedings of the CHI conferences are now available on the web. Second, our primary society publication, the SIGCHI Bulletin, is available electronically simultaneously with print copy distribution, with the most current issue being available to members only. In addition, we encourage the Publication Boards efforts to move toward a digital library for all ACM materials.
SIGCHI and the Internet. Our goal is to use the web to improve communication among our members and facilitate access by our members to relevant information. After many years of relying on the generosity of the Xerox corporation in supporting a centralized set of mail forwarding addresses, we migrated these lists to acm.org. To maintain the web pages for our society and our conferences, we hired a part-time professional information director. All of our conference distribution lists, most of the solicitation for conference volunteers, many mail lists (such as chi-announcements, chi-jobs, chi-kids, chi-web), and many SIGCHI-supported publications (interactions, TOCHI, CHI conferences, CSCW conferences, HCI Bibliography, HCI Education Survey) can be found on the web.
Membership Development and Inter-society Relationships. Our goal is to understand who our members are and what their needs are, as well as establish better relationships with other SIGs and non-ACM organizations with interests in HCI. In the membership arena, we conducted focus groups with past, present, and future members; and prepared a SIGCHI brochure to recruit new members. While we have a long history of cooperating with other societies on individual conferences, we want to examine cooperation at the society level, not only at the conference level. A cooperating society policy has been drafted and reviewed and is currently being rewritten.
Tutorials to go. Our goal is to extend the value of the tutorials from the annual CHI conference by offering them at other times and at other locations. This would both broaden education about human-computer interaction (HCI) and strengthen SIGCHI's position in the HCI community. Obstacles to this program include the logistics of offering tutorials, the selection of tutorials to offer, and the development of a financial model for offering tutorials. Stated differently, the major obstacle was in finding the right person to define this program and begin its implementation. Recently, we found and funded such a person and we believe this program is now well on its way to success.
SIGCHI Development Fund. Our goal was to use some of our budget surplus to fund the advancement of HCI and the communication of those advances within the SIGCHI community. Proposals are accepted from any SIGCHI member and efforts are led and conducted by volunteers. We established this fund in FY '96.
Since establishing the SIGCHI Development Fund, we have supported:
Our Development Fund is publicized widely and often among our membership.
The focus of the current Executive Committee falls into three broad categories: world-wide with the goal to continue supporting a global HCI presence by actively supporting and nurturing regional and national groups, and by further developing awareness and education of cultural differences and similarities; membership retention and volunteerism with the overarching goal to attract new members and retain current members by providing value to the membership, and conferences with the goal to advance HCI in the world through the facilitation of conferences and information dissemination to promote HCI on a continual basis. We list these as "new initiatives" because they were not addressed in our last program review. However, work has been done in all these areas for the past several years and, we expect, will continue for the next several years.
Student kits. According to ACM statistics, people who join ACM student chapters are more likely to become and continue as ACM members. During the past two years, we have made student kits available to educators to distribute to their students. These kits typically contain a copy of the SIGCHI Bulletin, Communications of the ACM, interactions, Transactions on CHI, as well as a SIGCHI brochure and ACM and SIGCHI membership information. Demand for these kits is very high. We have expanded this program to provide these materials to prospective members of our local SIGs, as well.
SIGCHI and the Web. The continued and explosive growth of the web dictates a continued focus on SIGCHI's web presence. Actually, the web changes so quickly and our conferences and volunteer committees want to take advantage of new capabilities so quickly that we cannot envision putting SIGCHI and the Web into the solved category. We anticipate that it will long continue in the New Initiatives category.
Historically, many SIGs have had a volunteer Information Director who was responsible for the SIG's electronic presence. The growth of the capabilities offered by the web and the need to maintain current use of these capabilities makes this a very demanding job. We expect to continue to rely on a professional Information Director here, as well as involve a volunteer Adjunct Chair for Information as well as other volunteers.
There is a clear need here for professional support; volunteers do not have the time required to keep up with the growth of capability surrounding the web. In addition, the demand for professional web master is such that it is difficult find one willing to work part-time. ACM is not currently positioned to provide web support. We welcome discussions with other SIGs on how we might collectively hire a full-time person to support our web-based initiatives.
Membership and volunteerism. Two problems may be related. First, our membership retention numbers (like those of most other SIGs) indicate that we do not do as well as we would like in retaining members. Second, we have a hard time matching volunteers to jobs; some may volunteer for jobs for which they have inadequate experience, but more often we cannot find volunteers to accept senior leadership roles. We think the common problem may be that we do not make it clear to our members what our society is concerned with and what advantages membership offers and do not publicize volunteer opportunities.
To address this problem, we are initiating three task forces. The model for each task force is the same -- to engage our members in a limited-effort, short-time volunteer effort that is focused on defining the problems that should be addressed. It could be that some task force members continue to work and address these problems; it could be that some problems are referred back to the EC with a recommendation for how to proceed or a request for more funds. The three task forces now forming focus on membership outreach, the domains of HCI, and mentoring of new members.
Also under the category of membership, we are also creating a membership program for people in economically disadvantaged countries that parallels ACM's program of "n memberships for the price of one" in selected countries.
The International Task Force of SIGCHI was established to address issues of the internationalization of the organization. SIGCHI is in the process of having its web site translated into a number of non-English languages in an effort to expand the HCI community. The continuing challenge is to understand the complexity of local groups that need to interact within the HCI global environment.
Local SIGs. Local SIGs provide an opportunity for SIGCHI members and others interested in HCI to gather on a regional basis; they provide an opportunity for SIGCHI to reach into new communities. During the past several years, we have had very active Adjunct Chairs for Local SIGs. Currently, we have 30 local SIGs, either fully formed or in the process of forming in 13 countries. This is a significant increase from our last program review. The Executive Committee plans to hold its future meetings in conjunction with local SIGs in an effort to create greater synergy between the groups.
As both the number and activity of the local SIGs grows, so grow the demands for support from SIGCHI. During this calendar year, we will consider what the nature of the ties between the local SIGs and SIGCHI should be (for example, local SIG members do not need to be SIGCHI members).
Conference Management. Conferences require a great deal of time and, for all conferences, but especially for larger ones, they require skills, such as logistics planning, that our volunteers do not generally possess. For many years, we have supported conferences through the volunteer Conference Management Committee. Over the past few years, we have also increased the role of professionals in supporting conference management. After one brief attempt to support a SIGCHI conference manager on the ACM staff, we are now contracting with a firm to handle many of the conference logistics and operations issues. During the next few years, we expect to both increase and refine the support we get from conference management firms.
A second conference issue is how to support the smaller conferences. While these conferences are the most likely ones to expand the field of HCI in new directions, it is difficult for them to operate with the same expectation of financial success as the larger conferences. Our Conference Management Committee is addressing the need for alternative models of conference support and of financial models.
Education. The focus on education touches many projects. Above, we reviewed the tutorials to go program. The SIGCHI and the Web and the Local SIGs initiatives, as well as Development Fund projects, all help to improve the development and delivery of education about HCI. One additional major initiative in this area is CHIkids.
CHIkids is not a traditional "child care" program; rather, it is a forum in which children technology, and HCI practitioners and researchers meet. And when they meet, they all benefit! Children take part in our conference; they produce a daily newspaper, they speak at panel sessions, they design multi-media presentations, they evaluate new products. Researchers and developers get access to the users they target their products to. Conference attendees get a new view of their conference when they are interviewed by 10 year olds. If you would like to know more about the CHIkids program, please visit the SIGCHI web pages at acm.org. We have been supporting CHIkids since 1996. It is an energizing and exciting part of our annual conference and we encourage other SIGs to adopt similar programs.
Society Structure. In the spring of 1996, the SIGCHI EC initiated discussions with the ACM Executive Director to explore a new relationship between SIGCHI and ACM and a partial or total society-based restructuring of ACM. The goal of the ACM Executive Director was to explore ways in which the 30+ SIGs could be restructured. Our goal was to create a self-governing, self-managing substructure within ACM, with its own separable but related identity and to do so in such a way that partnership between SIGCHI, ACM, and other ACM units would be strengthened and that all ACM units would benefit
Creating new structures for the technical communities within ACM would require changes to the ACM Constitution and Bylaws. During the past two years, discussions of restructuring ACM have proceeded with the deliberation that is due. Changes have been proposed, and, in January, these changes were discussed and endorsed by the SIG Chairs. We hope the SIG Chairs continue to work together to make these changes happen.
Elections/Officers. For the past two elections, we have had difficulty finding the number of candidates for office that our bylaws require. Currently, we have the following elected officers (in alphabetical order) -- Chair and Executive Vice-Chair (who must run as a team), Vice Chair for Communications, Vice Chair for Conference Planning, Vice Chair for Finance, Vice Chair for Operations, Vice Chair for Publications. We believe that the following are some of the reasons for this difficulty:
At our summer Executive Committee meeting, we will address this issue in connection with other bylaws revisions that will follow the ACM Constitution and bylaws revisions.
As noted above, we are also establishing a number of task forces which we hope will both identify candidates for office and allow volunteers a development path that allows them to assume more responsibility as they gain experience. We are also looking to our local SIGs program as a way to identify and develop our leadership.
As always, thanks are due to the ACM staff with whom we work. We thank Diane Darrow for her efforts on our behalf over the past few years. We welcome David Riederman, who became our program director last summer. David is a capable and energetic person and we value and are grateful for his participation in our activities.
For the past several years, we have had an annual one day meeting at ACM headquarters, where we spend a great deal of time with the ACM staff. We are grateful to the ACM staff for the time they spend meeting and working with us. These meetings have made working relationships between volunteers and staff more effective and we plan to continue making them a regular part of out Executive Committee meetings -- and we encourage other SIGs to do the same.
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Vol.30 No.3, July 1998 |
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