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Vol.30 No.4, October 1998
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Forty-three people from fifteen countries participated in the CHI 98 special interest group on the SIGCHI International Issues Committee: Taking Action. Three people contributed to the SIG via e-mail. This SIG's principal goals were to inform the CHI community about the creation of the SIGCHI International Issues Committee, to encourage broad participation in the committee's activities, and to develop an action plan for the committee in carrying out the SIGCHI Executive Committee's recommendations. David G. Novick organized the SIG and served as facilitator. In its group discussion, SIG participants identified key issues and proposed means of responding to these issues.
The SIG session opened with a presentation by Guy Boy, SIGCHI Executive Vice Chair, on recent developments in internationalizing our organization. SIGCHI, as the world's leading association for computer-human interaction, aspires to being a world-wide venue for our community. SIGCHI has already taken major steps toward internationalization, including the development of local chapters in many countries. SIGCHI faces a range of international challenges, including differences in intellectual and research traditions, perceptions of SIGCHI within national communities, language barriers and other problems in sharing HCI research, and differences in social and business interaction styles. In addition, SIGCHI members from different countries and research traditions take different approaches in how they structure arguments, what they consider to be data, and what the minimum requirements are for a publication in the field (these minimum requirements are not a matter of greater or lesser, but rather of what the required components are for a theory or research report). To address such issues, SIGCHI recently created the International Issues Committee (IIC), which Guy is chairing. The comittee will act to carry out the recommendations of the SIGCHI International Advisory Task Force.
In particular, the IIC's charge grows out of the following recommendations:
Issues raised by the IIC's goals were discussed by three additional panelists, representing a variety of backgrounds within the CHI community. Richard Anderson, SIGCHI local chapters coordinator, discussed the relationship of SIGCHI as an international organization to the growing set of local chapters. Gilbert Cockton, conference planning chair and SIGCHI liaison for the British HCI Group, discussed the role and function of SIGCHI in a country where there is a significant, existing profession HCI association. Steven Pemberton, a founder of the local chapter in the Netherlands, discussed how they organized a nationwide local chapter in a country that is geographically compact and where their SIGCHI local chapter is the first local-level HCI professional organization. Finally, Guy Boy, one of the founders of the local chapter in Toulouse, France, described the chapter's experience in a large country with other local HCI-oriented organizations.
The main part of the SIG session was devoted a group discussion of key issues and approaches that the IIC should address in meeting its charge. The participants identified three major questions and a number of associated actions.
The first question the participants expressed was how local needs and interests could be brought into CHI and dealt with on an international level. That is, there are issues of international concern that go beyond local chapters to reach CHI-wide interest. SIGCHI members in the US appear to have an easier time providing input to the organization. To address this issue, the participants suggested two approaches. To start, the CHI conference feedback form could be designed to elicit more information from people outside the US, including information that addressed issues relating to local SIGs. For the longer-term, the participants felt that it was important to build a cohesive group within their country called (or clearly related to) SIGCHI; this would establish a tangible local presence that would provide means for members to interact with SIGCHI.
The second question the participants expressed was how the CHI community at large could better relate to established national HCI groups, such as the British HCI Group in the UK and the AFIHM (Association Francophone d'Interaction Homme-Machine) in France. The participants developed three clear responses. First, SIGCHI should seek to build long-term, permanent relations with the existing national HCI groups. We should try to remove obstacles to joint membership and activities. Second, SIGCHI and the other groups should collaborate on matters of joint importance such education and professional mobility. Third, SIGCHI should seek merger or affiliation with other groups if this could be achieved with relative ease.
The participants explored the level of relation between local groups or chapters on one hand and ACM SIGCHI on the other. Here, the participants identified a number of possible paths. One possibility would be to grow local chapters into national SIGCHI organizations. Another would be to create, somehow, internationally chartered organizations.
Peter Gorny, contributing by e-mail, provided details of these issues in the case of Germany. At present there is a discussion as to whether the Technical Committee on Human Factors in Computing of the German GI (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik---Fach-ausschuss 2.3: Ergonomie in der Informatik) should get the status as German Chapter of SIGCHI. This could be technically possible, if the bylaws of SIGCHI (or of a future CHI Society) would allow for such a structure. Since other technical committees of GI have established equivalent links already (e.g., to EUROGRAPHICS), from our side there would be no technical hindrance. There are about 1600 members in the three working groups belonging to the technical committee. The German TC regularly organizes conferences on the topics in
Peter identified a number of key areas where solutions for such a this kind of arrangement would have to be developed:
The principal advantage of a formal relation between SIGCHI and the TC would be a closer connection between the two HCI communities; as things stand now, links exist only through the fact that some people have memberships in both organizations. The chief disadvantage of a formal relation would be the likelihood that a number of the present German members of SIGCHI will cancel their membership because they are already member of one of the working groups under GI-TC 2.3, and the membership fees of the GI-TC 2.3 working groups will have to be increased to cover the SIGCHI fee.
A third issue raised by the participants involved infrastructure for international research projects in HCI. One way to address this would be to arrange for information about local opportunities, programs and projects to be made more widely available. Gary Strong, director of the National Science Foundation's Human-Computer Interaction program, noted that the NSF is interested in supporting international collaboration in this area. The NSF can fund outside the US in some cases. In fact, US researchers are actively looking for non-US researchers with whom to collaborate for NSF projects. SIG participants suggested that SIGCHI could provide pairing facilities to help researchers both in the US and the rest of the world. In this regard, the participants generally saw Euro-centrism as a problem similar to that of US-centrism.
Infrastructure for research in the developing world continues to be a matter of concern. Apala Lahiri Chavan noted that in India, for example, the HCI community is very small and their biggest problem is lack of resources. Getting materials such as books and journals takes forever; ordering a book through a local book shop implies a two-month wait. Since researchers outside corporate environments cannot use international credit cards, even ordering anything via the Internet becomes a very complex affair. This lack of resources adversely affects the growth of the community immensely. Students, at National Institute of Design, the country's premier design school, who choose to do a project in the area of HCI often feel frustrated because of the lack of availability of supporting material (not to mention student projects sponsored by industry).
Apala made two recommendations. First, SIGCHI could help by organizing some method by which we could have easy access to materials. Second, some kind of exchange program could be put in place, by means of which students as well as other HCI practitioners could work on short-term international projects. Without measures such as these, the growth of the HCI community in India is going to be a painful and slow affair.
In terms of specific actions to support the recommendations, the participants suggested that a multi-language SIGCHI Web site would make information more accessible to an international CHI community. In fact, with Steven Pemberton's initiative, this is already underway. In general, CHI-related information can be disseminated internationally to and via students and through official information sources such as embassies. Another possible action would be to have the CHI conference organized alternately outside the US. CHI 2000 is slated for The Hague, in the Netherlands. The participants suggested that the IIC should look at how this issue is handled by other computer science organizations and fields. If possible, SIGCHI should consider cross-national training for SIGCHI co-chairs and other executive functions. As to whether there should be explicit regional representatives on the SIGCHI Executive Committee, it was noted that (a) there is actually international diversity within the EC and this is virtually certain to be pursued in the future, and (b) the IIC is being set up with explicit regional representatives and will serve this function within SIGCHI as an organization.
IIC chair Guy Boy thanked the participants for their help. The issues and solutions they developed will be used by the IIC, which is now in formation, to take action on the main themes identified in last year's Task Force report. Guy would like people with ideas or actions they'd like to suggest along these lines to write to him at boy@onecert.fr.
Thanks to the SIG participants and panelists for their contributions toward a community vision for progress on international issues. Apala Chavan and Peter Gorny contributed material incorporated into the report. Michael Muller and Richard Anderson provided valuable comments on the draft report.
David G. Novick
European Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Engineering (EURISCO)
4 avenue Edouard Belin
31400 Toulouse, France
e-mail: David.Novick@onecert.fr
URL: http://www-eurisco.onecert.fr/~novick
Tel: +33 (0) 5 62 17 38 38
Fax: +33 (0) 5 62 17 38 39
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Vol.30 No.4, October 1998 |
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