Austin Henderson
This Special Interest Group was occasioned by the then-impending occurrence of the Policy'98, ACM's first conference on engaging United States policy-making. Since Policy'98 was to follow CHI 98 so closely, many who attended CHI 98 would not be able to attend Policy'98. Therefore this SIG was intended to provide attendees at CHI 98 with the opportunity to consider issues that should be addressed at Policy'98, to enable those who are attending, some of whom would take an active part in this SIG, to carry these issues to Policy'98.
This Special Interest Group had four purposes:
- to provide CHI participants with an opportunity to discuss policy issues that are of concern to SIGCHI,
- to provide those attending Policy'98 with a SIGCHI perspective on Policy issues, and particularly to consider the issues from the perspective of a global organization,
- to address the question of whether SIGCHI should involve itself in policy-making issues, and
- to explore what role SIGCHI might play in supporting those within SIGCHI who are concerned with policy-making world-wide.
On May 10-12, 1998, the Association for Computing held its annual meeting in Washington DC. This national conference focused on critical public policy issues affecting the future of applications of computing. The purpose of the conference was to forge stronger links between computer professionals and policy makers. Participants interacted with leaders from academia, industry, Congress, and Executive agencies, and participated in debates on policy issues including Universal Access, Electronic Commerce, Intellectual Property, and Education On-line. Participants were able to influence decisions about making productive use of computing and information processing innovations, while coping with the inherent dangers of any transformational technology. In the view of the organizers, continuing collaborations with policy-makers will be beneficial to citizens, consumers, entrepreneurs, students, and computing professionals.
About 30 people attended this session. Austin Henderson introduced the session, and took public notes. First, people introducing themselves and saying who they were, what organization they represented, and what their concerns were with policy-making. This was followed by general discussion, in which a wide variety of interests were expressed, with perspectives from government, academia, and industry represented.
The discussion was initially focused on identifying the policy issues, where appropriate identifying SIGCHI positions on these issues, and finally identifying actions that SIGCHI might take. It quickly became clear that any serious discussion of even a single issue was beyond the scope of the time available. Not least of the reasons for this is that on any serious issue, there are many reasonable perspectives, and they all must be seriously considered. Policy-making is hard just because of the reasonableness of conflicting viewpoints. Therefore developing policy was dropped as a goal of the discussion.
From the discussion, a collection of issues that were of interest and concern to those attending were captured, and actions that SIGCHI could take to support the policy subcommunity were proposed.
The following issues were among those raised during the discussion:
- Intellectual Property
- Cryptography and encryption
- Universal access/universal service: language, skills, technology, citizen's participation
- Workplace injury
- Electronic commerce
- Learning on-line
- Standards
- Public understanding: medium of exchange, consciousness and proactivity.
The following actions were among those suggested during the discussion for SIGCHI to engage in to support the policy subcommunity:
- Discussion: Provide support for e-mail discussions.
- Materials collections: provide for the collection and dissemination of materials that would aid the policy community in their work, particularly:
- materials addressing the issues above
- guides to organizations involved in policy-making: names, addresses, roles, maps of relationships.
- maps of events, policies, positions
- Form alliances with other organizations that shared SIGCHI's commitments and values (e.g. American Library Association).
- Develop a "policy infrastructure" within SIGCHI as a home for discussion of, and action on, policy issues in those countries where SIGCHI members choose to become involved with policy-making.
- Raise the HCI-related policy issues publicly with SIGCHI, with ACM, and more broadly, through publications. Create a policy column in the Bulletin.
- Create a "policy clearinghouse" to inform interested SIGCHI members of actions that they can take to influence policy, and to inform policy-makers of people they can contact for expert opinion on HCI-related policy issues (e.g., for testifying, participate on commissions and panels, talk to the press, provide awareness and expertise in enforcement actions).
- Develop and collect scenarios that, through grounding in context, compellingly present the issues in their rich complexity.
- Work with universities and industry to educate students, practitioners, and the general public on HCI policy matters.
- Provide training for SIGCHI members on the art and science of advocacy.
- Develop occasions for leadership-to-leadership engagement between SIGCHI and government.
- Develop SIGCHI positions: on HCI issues, on appropriate research agenda (e.g., shaping the budget), and on promoting funding for HCI research.
This Special Interest Group produced three major conclusions and corresponding recommendations:
- There is a small but significant group of SIGCHI people concerned with policy-making in one way or another. SIGCHI should recognize this subcommunity and support it; initially, it was agreed to create an e-mail list for supporting discussions. In addition it was suggested that SIGCHI should take an immediate stance on the importance of policy-making by supporting Policy'98 and being officially represented there. [Note: CHI-Policy@acm.org has been set up for this purpose; it is open to all who would like to join. To subscribe, send a message to listserv@acm.org with the content "subscribe chi-consultants Jan Smith", where "Jan Smith" should be replaced by your name. The subject field of the message is ignored. SIGCHI became a sponsor of Policy'98 and sent Austin Henderson as its representative.]
- SIGCHI should have a policy substructure. A proposal for action to create this should be developed for SIGCHI's consideration. It was strongly felt that SIGCHI's policy substructure and policy positions should both reflect the perspectives of a global organization serving members from many nations.
- This SIG was of significant interest to those attending. Events for this subcommunity should be submitted to CHI 99. In particular, a panel on Policy would be appropriate for publicizing the issues, and workshop(s) would be good for struggling with SIGCHI policy on some issue(s).
Austin Henderson
Rivendel Consulting
PO Box 334
La Honda, CA 94020 USA
+1 650-747-9201
henderson@rivcons.com
