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Vol.30 No.4, October 1998
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Vol.30 No.4, October 1998 |
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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 5081 members (June 1998), approximately a 7% decrease over the past year. Our conferences and publications remain successful. Our finances are in excellent shape and our fund balance is well over the ACM-recommended level. We continue to define new programs that will address the goals outlined above.
The SIGCHI Bulletin continues 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 fourth year of publication and interactions magazine increased from four issues a year to six. About 35% of SIGCHI members subscribe to the "CHI Plus" membership plan that provides them with three conference proceedings per year. This is a slight decline from the past year. As the number of conference publications increases, we need to consider alternate plans for distributing proceedings.
The SIGCHI Bulletin is made available electronically through (http://www.acm.org/sigchi/bulletin/) simultaneously with print copies distribution, 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, and ISO C159/SC4/WG5. These activities include standards on graphical user interfaces, multimedia, and accessibility for disabled computer users.
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 for two projects.
First, SIGCHI is deploying a web site in Russia. Disseminating SIGCHI publications electronically rather than on paper will make them accessible to many more members. The local SIGCHI community will translate Bulletin articles into Russian, in addition to translating local articles into English.
Second, the publication of the Empirical Studies of Programming (ESP) proceedings. Many SIGCHI members participate in and benefit from the ESP conferences. When the current ESP publishing contract presented major problems and threatened to cancel publication, we arranged to publish through ACM, with SIGCHI guaranteeing the costs. SIGCHI will sponsor future ESP conferences beginning in 1999.
For several years, SIGCHI has supported the formation of local SIGs. Interest in local activities is increasing extensively and is reflected in an explosion of inquiries and investigations from/by people around the world into local SIGs over the past year. To provide a forum for leaders of current and prospective local SIGs to exchange experiences and ideas among themselves and with other SIGCHI leaders, a workshop for local SIGs was held at the CHI `98 conference. Subsequent collaboration and communication among local chapters and their leaders has increased because of this workshop and the active leadership of Richard Anderson, our Adjunct Chair for Local SIGs. SIGCHI's local SIGs provide ongoing benefit to their members and the field of HCI and are an area of rapid growth for SIGCHI. Currently, we have 30 local SIGs, either fully formed or in the process of forming in 13 countries.
Conferences held in FY98 in which SIGCHI was a sponsor or co-sponsor include:
Conferences in which SIGCHI was "in cooperation" (i.e., no financial or legal obligation) included:
At CHI 98, two SIGCHI Distinguished Service Awards were awarded:
Steven has been editor of the SIGCHI Bulletin for the past five years. The Bulletin is an important means by which SIGCHI members communicate with one another and Steven has done an excellent job of refining this important communication channel. Steven also serves as an ex officio member of the SIGCHI Executive Committee, was general co-chair for CHI'97, is Editor-in-Chief of interactions, and remains actively involved in many other SIGCHI activities.
Keith has served as SIGCHI's Information Director and helped us maintain our mailing lists, web pages, and general information infrastructure. As the use of the world wide web continues its rapid growth, it is important that a society concerned with human-computer interaction have a visible presence and one that can serve as a role model for others. We are grateful to Keith for the leadership he has provided and the directions he has set for us.
Also at CHI 98, Doug Engelbart was presented the first award from the SIGCHI Executive Committee for innovations in the field of human-computer interaction.
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 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.
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.
CHIkids is not a traditional "child care" program; rather, it is a forum in which children embrace 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.
We continue the Doctoral Consortium as part of the CHI conference. The Doctoral Consortium gives selected students who are completing their Ph.D. work in HCI the opportunity to interact with leading researchers.
The Development Consortium at CHI 98 focused on classroom teachers of children in the 9-17 year age range. The Development Consortium became part of the annual CHI conference in 1997 and is designed to provide interaction with communities of people who would not normally attend a CHI conference.
SIGCHI volunteers participate in Doug Engelbart's Bootstrap Institute meetings. These meetings examine how to benefit from the "collective IQ" when individuals or different groups work together. We hope this will be of benefit both within the SIGCHI community and within the community of all ACM SIGs.
SIGCHI is a worldwide organization. As communities of HCI professionals are developed throughout the world, we find our activities continue to expand outside the U.S. We have local SIGs either operating or being formed in fourteen countries (Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Switzerland, South Africa, United States).
Our executive Vice-Chair is leading a task force to develop recommendations for actions in support of SIGCHI's internationalization efforts and to define the roles and responsibilities of an International Advisory Board. This task force currently has members from over a dozen countries and the initial issues being addressed include:
Our elected and appointed committees include members from North America and Europe, and we hold committee meetings outside as well as within North America; our August '97 Executive Committee meeting was in Portland, Oregon; our December `97 meeting was in New York City; our April `98 meeting was in Los Angeles, California; our August '98 Executive Committee meeting will be in Rome, Italy.
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, though comparable with other SIGs. However, we have never concentrated on membership retention and have had no major membership promotion campaigns. Last year, we initiated an extensive market research program with current members, former members, and potential members. This year, we plan to work with our Program Director to use this data to define and implement a membership retention program.
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. We expect the recent appointment of a full-time Program Director will provide us with some additional resource to carry out additional programs.
Moving forward, we see several challenges.
These 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 second challenge 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 is crucial to our continued success and we are evaluating ways to enhance this partnership.
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.
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.
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 14 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).
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.
The final challenge is work with the other volunteer organizations of ACM to define and implement ACM Societies. 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 required changes to the ACM Constitution and Bylaws. These changes have now been made. We hope the SIG Chairs continue to work together to define and refine Societies within ACM.
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