Authors:
Gerrit van der Veer
In mid-2012, SIGCHI elected a new Executive Committee: Allison Druin is our new Vice President for Membership and Communication and Kristina Höök and Jofish Kaye are Vice Presidents at Large. Elizabeth Churchill, Gary Olson, and I were reelected. We reappointed Vice Presidents and Adjunct Chairs as far as available, and added John Thomas and Loren Terveen in the new roles of Adjunct Chair for Mentoring and Adjunct Chair of Awards.
The new EC decided to embark on in-depth strategic planning. Guided by Allison, we first reconsidered the basic values of SIGCHI as an organization. Human-computer interaction currently focuses on the human experience (interactivity, living online, etc.). We intend to broaden our communication and outreach to capture a range of activities in this domain, including papers, video, interaction, stories, and performances. SIGCHI values both research and practice, and especially the relation between both that should be mutually inspiring (different from a society of academics, or of practitioners). And SIGCHI aims at a quality of knowledge (and transparency in defining it) in all activities we support: Video can be archival, practice will be peer reviewed, and awards should stimulate the recognition of quality in all realms of our community.
To maintain and serve the whole domain of HCI, we identified further value clusters: Diversity and inclusion make our society a meeting point where geographic distances, multidisciplinary background, and cultural differences should not restrict collaboration but rather provide new knowledge and new approaches, inspiration, and mutual learning. There is value in specialized conferences as well as in CHI, and, in addition, in local workshops with the participation of colleagues from other parts of the community, as well as in local chapters. The community of colleagues is another valuable aspect. SIGCHI consists of people: HCI professionals in the broadest sense, whom we should support to meet online as well as face to face, and who should be able to know about each other and to establish focal communities within SIGCHI. As an organization, we value social impact and social responsibility in our meetings and in the work we support, and we value outreach to the world and providing open opportunities to benefit from our multifaceted productivity, wherever applicable.
Finally, SIGCHI values being financially responsible. Our members, the subscribers to our products, and the attendees at our conferences pay at the lowest financial level possible for what they appreciate and receive and may continue to expect for the future, and we should maintain an overall budget that allows the continuation of our work in this way.
Based on this value structure, we are currently developing our strategic initiatives: We are building our online communication (so we will redesign our website and news bulletin, and stimulate and support digital communities and our presence on social media); we are creating a new model for relating to local chapters (including an adjunct SIGCHI membership with no fee and real benefits, and an active local-chapters committee); and we are working on developing SIGCHI's uniqueness, reassessing our model for peer-reviewed archival knowledge (including a video venue), creating better connections between research and practice, and considering multilingual issues.
We aim to establish and stabilize relations with organizations such as UPA, HFES, and IFIP, and we will continue to support geographical development (Latin America and Africa are currently high priority). We aim at transparency regarding the review process for our conferences and at reducing costs for conference participation. We will continue to take initiatives and support HCI-related education (and we voted to spend a considerable amount of money on developing a realistic vision on the worldwide exchange of knowledge in our domain).
And we need all the help we can get, so volunteers may contact us right away.
—Gerrit C. van der Veer, President, ACM SIGCHI
©2013 ACM 1072-5220/13/05 $15.00
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