End of 2020 Recap from SIGCHI
The following email was sent out to all SIGCHI members on January 4, 2021.
Greetings SIGCHI Members!
As the new year is upon us, I wanted to send my best wishes to our SIGCHI members and recap the … interesting … year we have had.
COVID-19 — Responding with Resilience
The 2020 calendar year was somewhat turbulent for all of us, with COVID-19 playing a large role in the need to make adjustments to our work and lives amidst an ever-present uncertainty about the future. The COVID-19 crisis forced some SIGCHI conferences to be cancelled, while others moved to virtual venues. Both cancellations and the move to virtual venues meant that our volunteer organizers were placed in challenging situations. All of the organizers worked hard to publish the scientific content produced by the SIGCHI community, and to create venues for scientific discussion. We are grateful for their efforts — we know that working through the pandemic-induced problems required a great deal from each and every one of them.
And, due to the collective efforts of the volunteer organizers, the SIGCHI community was able to move forward with a number of experiments in sharing our scientific accomplishments in virtual venues. The SIGCHI Operations Committee led by VP for Operations, David A. Shamma, quickly got to work and put together a Remote Video Guide and ensured that the conferences’ content would be seen by our community members on the SIGCHI Youtube channel. A few 2020 fun facts about our channel:
- 318 hours uploaded
- 20,573 hours watched
- 11,469 shares
- 1M new views
Following the rush to go virtual for every conference from March 2020 forward, Operations spent significant effort adding features to the SIGCHI Programs web app to support virtual events. These features included enabling links to paper DOIs in the Digital Library, Zoom Links, Sli.do links, and YouTube Links. And as more of our community came online, with the ‘mini-CHIs’ and various talk series and our own Ask-Me-Anything sessions, the Development Fund Committee worked with Operations to put together a Community Calendar of virtual events open for all to join. Please contribute your event to this calendar by emailing us at sigchi-4all@acm.org] and check out what our community has to offer.
Early in the year, the EC members had planned a set of projects as a part of the FY21 SIGCHI budget. By March 2020, COVID-19 threw out all those plans in one sweep, and we were back to the drawing board. Led by VP for Finances, Anirudha Joshi, we managed to plan out an alternative, more cautious budget and have been monitoring the losses and future budgets of all our conferences more closely. The good news is that after some early losses from forced cancellations, subsequent virtual conferences have been able to balance their budgets with reduced registration rates.
Significant challenges remain for us to overcome, especially as all of the ACM conferences work towards full accessibility and equity in hosting virtual events. But there were plenty of successes in exchange of ideas throughout the ACM and SIGCHI that we are building on. We continue to discover opportunities for using virtual venues in the coming year, when COVID-19 will still prevent many members of our community from travelling. Also, the experiences we are gaining in organizing virtual events can be the basis of expanding the reach of SIGCHI in the future, when this pandemic subsides.
More Inclusive, Equitable, and Accessible
2020 was also a year of reflections on race in America that had far-reaching implications for racial dynamics globally. Topics of equity, inclusion, and racial justice are at the top of many of our minds. The SIGCHI EC had already made Promoting Inclusivity a strategic initiative at the start of its current term; the events of this year propelled further conversations with members of our community and commitments to begin to take action — one step being the addition of two new Equity ACs to the EC. We will continue to see outcomes of this work in the new year that I hope will lay a foundation for subsequent community initiatives.
We established SIGCHI CARES in January 2020, chaired by VP-at-Large Shaowen Bardzell, with a total of fourteen members. SIGCHI CARES exists to support those who experience discrimination and/or harassment at SIGCHI events, offering them an open and confidential conversation, which, with the consent of the affected individual(s), can also lead to creating better awareness of discriminatory dynamics on the part of event organizers and increasing the accountability of conference organizers, event staff, and conference attendees. CARES supports those affected by allowing them to engage with established allies within the SIGCHI community. Although ACM has formal mechanisms to handle cases of discrimination and harassment, SIGCHI CARES serves a different purpose. CARES provides a more informal support structure composed of peers who listen, provide emotional support, and help affected individuals understand and navigate their options. Contact SIGCHI CARES at sigchi-cares@acm.org to be put in touch with a representative. All communications are confidential.
The focus of the Operations Committee in 2020 was on accessibility. First, they found a responsible vendor (who fairly paid their crowd workers) for ordering closed captions on pre-recorded videos. Next, while many conference chairs wanted to experiment with new platforms for virtual attendance, they insisted any platform must meet accessibility guidelines (i.e. WCAG2.1 Grade AA). They also hired external audits for our Programs web app, its QOALA backend web app, and PCS 2.0. For both our conferences and our software, they target meeting WCAG2.1 Grade AA compliance by the end of the year which is on course for everything except QOALA (which was just audited last week). Lastly, we have been testing live captioning systems with the ACM for our SIGCHI conferences, as well as all conferences across the organization. This is the first of many accessibility efforts SIGCHI Operations is undertaking for the benefit and reach of our members, both SIGCHI and ACM.
Global Community Support
The SIGCHI Development Fund has been a great mechanism, in recent years, for our members to receive funding support to carry on events and activities for the benefit of a globally dispersed membership. In January 2020, Neha Kumar, VP-at-Large and Chair of the SIGCHI Development Fund, recruited via open call a global set of members for the Development Fund Committee. Other than one skipped funding cycle in April, for temporary austerity measures prompted by COVID’s beginnings, the Fund continued to operate on quarterly calls, with the committee awarding over 15 grants through 2020. Our July and October calls were dedicated to supporting virtual events and initiatives, aligned with the cause of supporting innovative virtual formats, and creating spaces to address racism and other systemic injustices in the SIGCHI community. We are grateful that our budget allowed us to support several interactive virtual engagements for audience participation around the world and particularly from/in the Global South, through online workshops, tools, and support for building educational content. Moving forward, we intend to do away with quarterly submissions and approve proposals year-round, hoping to return to supporting physical travel soon. Apply!
And for when travel plans are back in business, the committee has redesigned our travel awards based on the significant input and feedback received (thank you!) in a survey we ran earlier this year. A special thanks here to Jofish Kaye and Zhengjie Liu, who have been running our erstwhile SIGCHI Student Travel Grants, Gary Marsden Student Development Fund, and Early Career Mentorship Fund programs, and supported the Development Fund Committee in the task of consolidating these into the revised Gary Marsden Travel Awards. These will make travel support accessible to students as well as early career professionals, for those who need it in the Global South and North, on terms that are hopefully more flexible than before. The committee worked closely with the ACM to ensure that this program can continue to grow, facilitate travel award transfers (such as SIGCHI Awards recipients being able to donate their travel support to a student attendee), and, once we can physically travel again, engage a travel agent to cover expenses so awardees do not have to cover travel upfront while waiting for a reimbursement. Applications are open for “virtual travel” awards.
Growing and Supporting SIGCHI Local Chapters
We have had a significant and continued emphasis on developing HCI communities around the world, and to integrate regional HCI communities into the worldwide network of HCI researchers and innovators. Our VP for Chapters, Eunice Sari, initiated our new Local Chapters Funding mechanism that has sponsored 13 chapters to date, mostly from Asia and the Middle East. The funding has empowered chapters who were previously unable to conduct a large range of national and international local activities. Despite the limitation to meet others face-to-face during the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant growth in SIGCHI local chapter activities such as regular meetups, international symposiums and conferences, local official entities and online brands development, workshops, online course design and development, online design challenges and hackathons, and online infrastructure development that have now been conducted across the globe.
These initiatives have enabled mutual collaboration between local chapters and international HCI communities. HCI and UX experts from all over the world have the opportunities to expand their global HCI community involvement, while at the same time the local chapters have the golden learning opportunities to learn directly and expand their networks with the experts and international HCI communities. More information about the chapter activities in 2020 can be found in the chapters newsletters. With the growing number of chapters, 12 student chapters and 56 professional chapters around the globe, we hope to reach out and support more SIGCHI chapters and members. Applications for chapters grants are open!
Strengthening Our Publications Infrastructure
In the past year, under the guidance of our VP for Publications, Julie Williamson, SIGCHI has contributed to publication infrastructure, including supporting template development, TAPS adoption, and volunteer training. The current pipeline for publications through a vendor (i.e. Sheridan) to support transferring documents to the digital library is ending life in 2020 and will be replaced with The ACM Publishing System (TAPS). TAPS synchronizes all the metadata between the ACM DL and PCS and our Programs web app; this overall system greatly reduces time to publication and author frustration. SIGCHI has worked closely with ACM to test and implement new document templates, in particular the Word author template design to match the LaTeX Manuscript layout. Our flagship conference reverted to an old template in response to the challenges of 2019, but we contracted a vendor to ensure continuity in accessible proceedings during this transition. With the support of the SIGCHI EC, an increasing proportion of our specialised conferences have been opting in to the new workflow to automatically produce accessible HTML proceedings. For instance, proceedings chairs are supported by the VP for Publications through live training (teleconference) and documentation. These activities aided better volunteer experiences in conferences opting in to the new workflow, including IMX, AutomotiveUI, MobileHCI, and HRI. Finally, SIGCHI is also actively exploring the new PACM publishing model, with SIGCHI sponsoring two of the existing four PACM titles. We are growing the PACM HCI title, with the addition of specialised conference CHI PLAY to the title this year and welcome the new Editor-in-Chief Jeff Nichols and new Editorial Board.
Communications and Outreach
The Communications Committee under the lead of Pejman Mirza-Babaei in fiscal year 2020 had a main focus on public communications and outreach to allow members to receive information on a broader range of channels. The SIGCHI Medium publication, started by his committee in 2019, is now an active mechanism for reaching our membership. The Voices of SIGCHI section of this Medium publication aims to connect us to initiatives and activities of HCI researchers and practitioners around the globe. For example, our recent post by Catherine Plaisant aiming to bring historical CHI videos to the ACM Digital Library — check out the video preview! We invite more contributions to this forum (by emailing sigchi-4all@acm.org) so as to afford glimpses into the diverse lives of our membership.
With the end of September 2020, social media channels are well established with around 6500 Twitter followers, 7100 followers on LinkedIn and 4900 on Facebook. A key channel for the spread of information are still traditional mailing lists, with CHI-Announcements with 890 subscriptions, CHI-Jobs serving 3390 subscribers and CHI resources with about 1200 subscriptions (you can see all of our mailing lists here: https://sigchi.org/operations/listserv/). The main goal for fiscal year 2020 was to increase membership in Asia together with communication efforts focused around local chapters in Asia and a series of events preparing for CHI in Japan. As for all other areas, this focus on Asia was overshadowed by the changes due to COVID-19 with a more reactive communication strategy.
In an effort to foster greater transparency in communications between the SIGCHI leadership and membership, all SIGCHI EC members participated in Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions from August to December, initiated by Neha Kumar and continued by our new Adjunct Chair for Outreach Casey Fiesler. Each of these sessions also used Sli.do to afford anonymity to those with questions or complaints, which were then addressed during the session or after. The recordings are available on our YouTube channel, and Operations has ensured that each of these sessions was professionally captioned. Our new ACs for Accessibility Stacy Branham and Soraia Pretch also helped with these, after coming on board in September 2020, ensuring that our last few sessions additionally had a sign language interpreter present. As always, we welcome the input of our members, and would encourage you to reach out to us with questions, comments, or suggestions in whatever medium you feel comfortable. To reach the entire EC, you can always email SIGCHI-EC@listserv.acm.org.
Changing Membership
The cancellation of CHI 2020 also directly impacted SIGCHI’s membership numbers. Traditionally, every year, about 1000 non-ACM/SIGCHI CHI Conference registrants automatically become members of SIGCHI when signing up for the conference. With CHI2020 being cancelled, the natural outcome was that we would not have that artificial influx of new members. This resulted in a reduction of members with about 3000 paying SIGCHI members as of December 2020. Although this reduces our relative SIG size in the ACM, we are still a relatively large SIG and, more importantly, we still have a wide influence through our 24 conferences. The SIGCHI EC has since decided to officially end the practice of giving SIGCHI membership to non-ACM/SIGCHI members attending CHI. For one, this means that our ‘membership’ actually reflects those who wish to invest in the SIG. This also results in savings for the conference as the cost of these memberships traditionally came out of the CHI budget. This second point is important as the conference series leadership continues to work to find cost savings in order to ensure the registration rates stay flat.
Changing Executive Committee
The SIGCHI Executive Committee regularly has people join and leave and this year was no exception. We started the year by saying goodbye to Aaron Quigley so he could co-Chair CHI2021 with Yoshifumi Kitamura, and we welcomed Andrew Kun as Interim VP for Conferences. During the summer we said goodbye to Pejman Mirza-Babaei who had been Interim VP for Membership and Communication and welcomed back Regina Bernhaupt after co-chairing CHI 2020 in these turbulent times. And we ended the year saying goodbye to Cliff Lampe as Executive VP and David Ayman Shamma as VP for Operations so they could become co-Chair (with Simone Barbosa) and Technical Program co-Chair (with Caroline Appert) respectively for CHI 2022. In Ayman’s place we now welcome David Karger as the new Interim VP for Operations. All of these moves were in keeping with the agreement that members holding key organizing commitments at an upcoming CHI cannot also serve on the SIGCHI EC. Finally, in addition to those CHI-related comings and goings, during the year we said goodbye to Allison Druin after serving generously as our inaugural Adjunct Chair for Inclusion — a very large job to start and manage — and welcomed FIVE new Adjunct Chairs in Equity (Adriana S. Vivacqua and Vino Vinayagamoorthy), Accessibility (Soraia Prietch and Stacy Branham — sigchi-access@acm.org), and Outreach (Casey Fiesler).
Your Next Executive Committee
The final thought I want to leave all of you with as this year closes is for the future. My term is coming to an end and Loren Terveen, with the support of a carefully chosen committee, has finalized a new slate of candidates for President, Executive Vice President, VP for Finances, VP for Membership and Communication, and two VP-at-Large positions, which will be made public in January. The SIGCHI community members voted into these positions will be leading the organization July 2021-June 2024. As elected members of the new EC, they will be supporting physical meetings again although potentially more hybrid, creating ways to expand our global membership and influence, and innovating our publications and reviewing processes. In order to vote in the upcoming election, you must be a SIGCHI Member by mid-March — not simply an ACM member. Take a moment to note when your SIGCHI membership expires and if you need to renew in order to vote. And reach out to fellow members of your HCI community to encourage them to become/renew their membership and cast their vote.
Happy New Year!
Helena Mentis, SIGCHI President, sigchi-president@acm.org
