From the Chairs: Challenges and Opportunities

Mike Atwood and Guy Boy

The next few years will be exciting and important ones for SIGCHI and we invite your participation in leading the continuing evolution of our society. In this column, we will outline some of the challenges we see and offer opportunities for you to help overcome these challenges, as well as identify new ones.

In past columns, we have given you updates on progress in creating Societies within ACM and in changing SIGCHI into a Society. When the last column went to press, the next major milestone was approval of amendments to the ACM Constitution and Bylaws. These amendments were approved and we thank you for your support and your vote. In this column, we will focus on where we go from this point.

Bylaw 6 of the ACM Constitution (http://www.acm.org/constitution/) deals with Special Interest Groups, of which SIGCHI is currently one. The purpose of this bylaw is stated as "This Bylaw defines the purposes of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), which can have other designations as approved by the ACM Council; the rules for forming and dissolving them; and the authority of the SIG Governing Board (SGB) and the ACM Executive Committee (ACM EC) in managing them."

This bylaw is deliberately not specific about what the "other designations" might be. Appropriately, it is left to each SIG to define what designation they want; and there is more to a "designation" than just a "name". Changing the designation means changing SIGCHI's bylaws. (The current bylaws are at http://www.acm.org/sigchi/documents/bylaws.html).

When current and past SIGCHI officers initiated discussions with ACM about changing SIGCHI from a "SIG" into a `Society", 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. This remains our goal.

The first motivation for this goal was the recognition that SIGCHI supports a highly interdisciplinary field. HCI has a strong grounding in IT (represented by ACM) and integral involvement from other non-IT fields: psychology, anthropology, linguistics, graphic design, and many more. While many HCI professionals identify closely with ACM, many receive their primary benefit from association with the HCI community in SIGCHI. We wanted, therefore, an identity that encompasses both the HCI and IT communities. Second, we recognized the need for additional, dedicated professional staff to help us implement programs to benefit HCI and SIGCHI's membership. While our volunteers can and do define needed and valuable programs, we lack the staff support to implement them. Currently, our primary support staff is managed by the ACM HQ staff. As a self-managing organization, we should have more control over our support staff. These remain our motivations.

Clearly, there are many important issues to be addressed in making our transition from "SIG" to "Society". Achieving many of the milestones required for this transition, such as ACM Constitution and Bylaws changes, required the effort of many people in the ACM community. While SIGCHI officers and members were involved in initiating and working on these activities, they were not activities that SIGCHI could accomplish alone. However, the next important milestone is one that SIGCHI can (and must) accomplish alone. Our bylaws must be examined and redrafted.

The current Executive Committee has set a goal to redraft our bylaws before their term of office expires on 30 June 1999. Clearly, this is an ambitious goal. Please let us know what issues you believe should be addressed in new bylaws. Once drafted, the SIGCHI membership will be asked to vote on approving the new bylaws. Through this column and through the chi-announcements@acm.org mailing alias, we will keep you informed of the status of this process.

SIGCHI will also elect a new Executive Committee in the spring of 1999. This is an especially important election since the flexibility to redraft our bylaws allows us the opportunity to define our collective vision for the future of our society and our profession and we need leaders who are committed to achieving that vision.

Because the coming election is so important, we want to conduct it in a slightly different way than has been done in the past. Historically, candidates have provided brief statements of their goals and these statements were included with the ballots. Since each candidate was free to choose the issues addressed in their statement, common issues were infrequently addressed and it was often difficult to compare candidates' views on a given issue.

The Nominating Committee plans to have a draft slate of candidates in early November. In early December, the Nominating Committee will present a set of common questions to the candidates which are to answered by early January. These answers will then appear in the April 1999 issue of the Bulletin, allowing you time to review them before voting in early June 1999.

We invite your participation in writing the questions that will be asked of candidates for the next Executive Committee. What issues are important to you? What would you like to know about the candidates? Please send your questions to us and we will send them to the Nominating Committee. (As always, contact information is on the back side of the front cover of the Bulletin.)

We want to thank the members of the Nominating Committee -- Robert Burns (Boeing), Erika Dawn Gernand (Texas A&M University), David Novick (EURISCO), Brian Smith (MIT), and Dennis Wixon (DEC). Mike Atwood is Chairperson of the Nominating Committee.

Finally, we send our congratulations to the ACM officers who will take office on July 1, 1998 -- Barbara Simons (President), A. Joe Turner (Vice President), Claus Unger (Secretary), David Brown and Maria Klawe (Members-At-Large), Bryan Preas (Western Regional Representative). The future presents both challenges and opportunities for SIGCHI, the field of HCI, and ACM and we look forward to working with the new ACM officers to meet these challenges and to continue to evolve our collective society.

Regards,

Mike & Guy

chi-chair@acm.org,
chi-executive-vc@acm.org

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Vol.30 No.4, October 1998
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