From the Editor: New Developments

Steven Pemberton

Election Results

The Bulletin and interactions

Election Results

For those of you who have been waiting with bated breath for the results of the vote on the change to ACM's constitution, you can unbate immediately. The results are in, and the changes were accepted! This means that SIGCHI can go ahead with its plans to become a society. This is exciting news, and we'll be keeping you in touch with the developments.

The Bulletin and interactions

And one of the developments is an idea that has been mooted to make interactions the SIGCHI membership publication instead of the Bulletin when SIGCHI becomes a society.

What would this mean?

There are several possible scenarios but the one that has been suggested is the following:

interactions becomes the membership publication
The content of interactions does not change (in particular, it contains no society news)
Considering the important niche that the Bulletin fills, it continues as an electronic-only publication, with the same sort of content as now.
Periodically, say three times a year, a membernet-like paper supplement to interactions is published, containing society news, and summarising what is new on the web in the Bulletin.

What ramifications might this have?

Firstly, it may impact membership fees (though bear in mind that there has been no discussion so far of what effect becoming a society would have on fees): interactions comes out more frequently than the Bulletin, is in colour, and has paid staff.
Secondly, it may affect people in less web-connected parts of the world. To tell you the truth, we have no figures on what proportion of the membership have no web connections, though colleagues in Russia have said that they prefer web access to paper, since it is quicker and cheaper.
It also means that if you want to read the Bulletin anywhere apart from at your screen, you will have to print the articles out.

We would love to hear your opinions on these issues. Would you prefer to have interactions as the membership publication? What about if it meant higher membership fees? What do you think about the Bulletin becoming electronic only? Would you be happy with it if you received a regular paper insert telling you what's new?

It is possible to discuss these issues on a mailing list; to join send the message

subscribe chi-publications
<your email> <your name>

on one line, to listserv@acm.org. To contribute, send email to chi-publications@acm.org.

If you don't want to join the discussion, but would still like to contribute your views, then by all means write to me.

Steven Pemberton, CWI, Amsterdam
chi-Bulletin-Editor@acm.org
http://www.cwi.nl/~steven

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Vol.30 No.3, July 1998
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