SIGCHI Annual Report

July 2023 — June 2024

Every year on August 15th, the ACM SIG Governing Board requires SIGs to submit an annual report highlighting its activities, accomplishments, concerns, etc. over the prior fiscal year. This below is what we submitted — a summary, by no means exhaustive, of all that SIGCHI was up to last year.

ACM SIGCHI is the leading international community of students, researchers, and professionals interested in research, education, and practical applications of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The SIG enables its members to create and shape how people interact with computing technologies, and to understand how such technologies impact people’s lives.

0. The SIGCHI Executive Committee

The SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC), when it concluded its term in June 2024, included the following 23 members. We extend our deepest gratitude to this team of dedicated volunteers, as well as others who came before them, for helping us accomplish the updates we present in this report.

Neha Kumar, President
Luigi De Russis, Executive Vice President
Simone Kriglstein, Vice President for Communications
Hao-Chuan Wang, Vice President for Finance
Naomi Yamashita, Vice President for Membership
Dhruv Jain, Vice President for Accessibility
Adriana S. Vivacqua, Vice President at Large (for Global)
Matt Jones, Vice President at Large (for Communities)
Susanne Boll, Vice President for Conferences
Kashyap Todi, Vice President for Operations
Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Vice President for Publications
Jeni Paay, Vice President for Chapters
Helena Mentis, Past President
Niklas Elmqvist, Adjunct Chair for Awards
Naveena Karusala, Adjunct Chair for Community Support
Cayley MacArthur, Adjunct Chair for Equity
Katta Spiel, Adjunct Chair for Equity
Kathrin Gerling, Adjunct Chair for Hybrid
Susan Dray, Adjunct Chair for Partnerships
Keith Instone, Adjunct Chair for Partnerships
Nicola Bidwell, Adjunct Chair for Sustainability
Catia Prandi, Adjunct Chair for Volunteer Support
Abhinav Thukral, Adjunct Chair for Web

A new EC term began on July 1, 2024, after the SIG elections were concluded in June. Leading up to these elections, the Nomination Committee Chair and Past President Helena Mentis organized a series of Meet-the-Candidates sessions where SIGCHI members were invited to engage with and ask questions of all candidates. These Zoom sessions were recorded and shared on the SIGCHI YouTube channel. This was also the first time that such dialog was made possible with all election candidates, for which we are thankful to Helena Mentis. The elections closed with the results below. We thank all the members who came forth to run for election, and hope that — regardless of the election outcomes — they will continue to volunteer to take the SIG forward.

Neha Kumar, President
Luigi De Russis, Executive Vice President
Susan Dray, Vice President at Large
Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Vice President at Large
Dragan Ahmetovic, Vice President for Accessibility
Naveena Karusala, Vice President for Communications
Hao-Chuan Wang, Vice President for Finance
Adriana S. Vivacqua, Vice President for Membership

1. Health and Viability

Now completing 42 years, SIGCHI remains one of ACM’s largest SIGs, growing steadily. The number of members has been increasing; we have nearly doubled in size over the last three years. According to an analysis we conducted in May 2024, we have approximately 5,400 members, our student membership has gone up from 21 to 34%, SIG-only membership from 29 to 44%, and the total number of countries represented from 71 to 84. The top ten countries that our members come from are distributed across the world, including USA, Germany, UK, Canada, Japan, India, China, Australia, Republic of Korea, and Netherlands, in decreasing order of membership strength.

We thank VP Membership Naomi Yamashita for her tireless efforts towards ensuring the health of our membership, by managing member benefits such as complimentary Grammarly subscriptions for members, keeping an eye on numbers and distribution of members, trouble-shooting to ensure that interested community members were able to sign up with ease, and overseeing the provision of complimentary membership to continuing volunteer leaders as a token of gratitude for their service.

We are an active SIG. We produced almost 5,000 publications in 2023, more than any other ACM SIG. The next highest SIG stands at approx. 1900 publications. We have 26 conferences, touching on many different facets of a rich and interdisciplinary field that we broadly recognize as HCI. We now have 70 chapters, spanning 42 countries and 6 continents. These numbers are all on the rise.

We are also a volunteer-rich SIG. Our SIG is governed via 271 volunteer roles at present [1], organized into 24 committees that are aligned in their focus on (a) ensuring high-quality knowledge production through our conferences and publications, (b) enriching our members’ experience, and (c) establishing a global community. These committees are collectively overseen by the SIGCHI EC (see above).

2. Efforts related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

SIGCHI is constantly making strides when it comes to efforts related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. We strongly believe in broadening equitable participation, and many EC roles have been focused on efforts to this end. Below we list just a few efforts that our EC members worked towards in 2023–2024.

The SIGCHI Development Fund (SDF) [2], managed by Community Support Chair Naveena Karusala, has since inception financially supported dozens of events and initiatives held by conferences, chapters, and the HCI community more broadly. SDF grants have enabled SIGCHI-sponsored conferences to experiment with new initiatives that make them more accessible, globally inclusive, sustainable, hybrid, equitable, etc., helping work towards these goals even in the midst of recent financial pressures on conference planning. During Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24), we supported our conferences with approximately $114K for 13 events (disbursed $98K). SDF grants have also supported our chapters in growing and connecting to one another, nurturing global participation in the field. Grants for chapters were approximately $26K, supporting 8 events. Other community initiatives the SDF supported brought diverse research areas and career stages together at workshops, mentorship initiatives, and new, in-cooperation, or regional conferences, adding to the richness of the field. Grants in this category were approximately $126K, supporting 20 events (disbursed $100K). Under our specific call for sustainability-related initiatives, we also supported two events with $9.5K (disbursed $8K).

Naveena Karusala also led the effort to introduce and iterate upon (with community feedback) the SDF Guidelines for Events and Initiatives [3] to prioritize accessible, safe, sustainable, equitable, global, and hybrid participation, with leadership roles, committees, and working groups dedicated to engaging community and infrastructuring to put these values into practice. We do not require SDF applicants to meet these guidelines; rather, they are intended to generate broad awareness and support organizers who may wish to incorporate these values in their events and initiatives. As an example, we share below the guidelines for accessibility.

• Does the event/initiative have an accessibility chair? If not, is it clearly indicated on the event/initiative website who can be reached to respond to accessibility requests?
• Does the event/initiative website provide information regarding accessibility (e.g., related to a venue, local area and accommodation, catering, COVID-19 masking policies, software, presentation formats, etc.)?
• Can Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), sign language interpreters, or other accessibility services be arranged at short notice if requested? If not, is a deadline indicated on the call?
• If some part of the technical program is not accessible by default (e.g., PDFs, presentations), is there a plan to make this accessible? Is information on how to do this available on the website for the event/initiative?

The Gary Marsden Travel Awards (GMTA) [4] program (with Naveena Karusala as GMTA Chair) has continued to support SIGCHI members with financial need in attending our sponsored conferences. In FY24, we awarded $113K to 88 members. We also implemented changes to make the program more flexible and inclusive. We introduced the opportunity for participants to indicate interest in virtual registration in case we are unable to award them support for in-person attendance. This has supported hybrid conferences and allowed us to enable conference attendance that would otherwise not be possible for those relying on the GMTA for funding. Working with the ACM, we implemented a process to request that an award be disbursed through an advance rather than reimbursement, allowing us to support awardees with acute financial constraints. We have also continued to reimburse expenses that support applicants’ care and accessibility needs, such as childcare, mobility aids, and companion travel tickets, introduced in the previous fiscal year.

The SIGCHI Accessibility Committee, under the leadership of our first VP Accessibility Dhruv Jain, has been working with SIGCHI stakeholders towards enhancing accessibility of our conferences. We have established new guidelines for smaller-scale events for which accessibility is a key component (see above). Now, via collaborative efforts with members of our community and advocacy organizations such as AccessSIGCHI, we are in the process of expanding resources and guidelines for our portfolio of conferences. We have also continued to cover all accessibility requests falling outside the budgets of our conferences (e.g., for sign language interpreting, real-time captioning, etc.), continued our PDF remediation program (taking help of an external vendor to make conference PDFs accessible), and added accessibility considerations to our travel awards program (see above).

SIGCHI’s Regional Committees are fueling community engagement globally. The last year saw community events organized by the EC and its regional committees in South Africa, Brazil, Italy, and Singapore. Our Latin America, Mediterranean, and Asia ad hoc regional committees have been actively working across chapters in these regions to identify challenges and opportunities they can work towards to grow SIGCHI’s global presence and success. Special thanks to Heloisa Candello, Gustavo Lopez, Maristella Matera, and Chat Wacharamanotham who led these committees, with Adriana S. Vivacqua, Luigi De Russis, and Hao-Chuan Wang as their EC Liaisons. Initiatives underway include a workshop at the ACM CSCW 2024 conference in Costa Rica, activities at ACM CHI 2025 in Japan, a summer school at Lake Como in 2025, among others. The EC also sponsored a leadership summit for HCI researchers and practitioners in Cape Town in 2023, led by Partnerships Co-Chair Susan Dray and Community Support Chair Naveena Karusala, and hopes to continue strengthening SIGCHI ties and presence in Africa.

The SIGCHI Sustainability Committee inaugurated by Sustainability Chair Nic Bidwell has launched a number of initiatives to grow awareness among SIGCHI members regarding sustainability. A Sustainable-SIGCHI listserv was started last year and, with more than 170 members now, regularly sees updates from members that show a growing intersection of sustainability and HCI. Panels at our flagship conference CHI in 2023 and 2024 have attempted to engage the larger community in dialogue on this intersection. A continuing series of Medium posts from the Sustainability Committee members have also served to shed light on sustainable prototyping practices for HCI professionals.

The SIGCHI Equity Committee, under the leadership of Co-Chairs Cayley MacArthur and Katta Spiel, worked towards resources for streamlining safety programming across SIGCHI activities and motivating equity-related training for volunteers across SIGCHI interested in acquiring and updating sensitivities regarding safe conduct and support. SIGCHI CARES (led by Co-Chairs Michael Muller and Celine Latulipe) continues to promote safety of members across our 26 conferences. The Research Ethics Committee (led by Co-Chairs Melissa Densmore and Cosmin Munteanu) and the Publications Committee (inaugurated by VP Publications Pejman Mirza-Babaei) aim to provide support to authors and reviewers regarding ethical research practices and ACM policies. The Chapters Committee (led by VP Chapters Jeni Paay) works to support SIGCHI members across the world, and particularly in the Global South, to create and nurture local communities. The Communications Committee (led by VP Communications Simone Kriglstein) makes sure that all the work of our volunteer leaders and their committees is visible to the larger community. All these efforts are ongoing, serving to broaden participation and continuing to enrich our SIG-wide activities.

3. Awards and Recipients

The SIGCHI awards for 2024 increased in number this year with the Awards Committee generously and enthusiastically recognizing more nominees than in the past, in particular to align with the rate at which the community is growing. This is the first year that saw four Lifetime Research Awardees (typically there is one), ten Academy inductees (exceeding the prior cap of eight), and five Outstanding Dissertation Awardees (up from three in prior years). Discussions have been underway regarding new awards that might be introduced. You can find the names and affiliations of the awardees below and more information about them on our blog [5]. We are thankful to our Awards Chair Niklas Elmqvist and the Awards Committee he leads for doing the work to arrive at this excellent list of awardees.

SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award
Susanne Bødker — Aarhus University, Denmark
Jodi Forlizzi — Carnegie Mellon University, USA
James A. Landay — Stanford University, USA
Wendy Mackay — Inria, France

ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award
Elizabeth Churchill — Google, USA

ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award
Jan Gulliksen — KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Amy Ogan — Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Kate Starbird — University of Washington, USA

ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award
Karan Ahuja — Northwestern University, USA (Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Azra Ismail — Emory University, USA (Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
Courtney N. Reed — Loughborough University London, UK (Ph.D. from Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Nicholas Vincent — Simon Fraser University, Canada (Ph.D. from Northwestern University, USA)
Yixin Zou — Max Planck Institute, Germany (Ph.D. from University of Michigan, USA)

ACM SIGCHI Academy Class of 2024
Anna Cox — University College London, UK
Shaowen Bardzell — Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Munmun De Choudhury — Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Hans Gellersen — Lancaster University, UK and Aarhus University, Denmark
Björn Hartmann — University of California, Berkeley, USA
Gillian R. Hayes — University of California, Irvine, USA
Julie A. Kientz — University of Washington, USA
Vassilis Kostakos — University of Melbourne, Australia
Shwetak Patel — University of Washington, USA
Ryen W. White — Microsoft Research, USA

The SIGCHI EC is currently organizing a series of Awards Talks — Zoom sessions where SIGCHI members are invited to listen to the awardees talk about their accomplishments, and engage with them live. These Zoom recordings will be made available on SIGCHI’s YouTube channel. Although we started with the 2024 awardees, we have opened up this opportunity to prior awardees as well.

4. Significant Papers

We have 26 conferences and, in the past year, they generated almost 5,000 Digital Library entries, which makes it a gargantuan task to share all significant contributions from the SIG. To simplify this task, we share below the Best Paper Award recipients from our flagship conference CHI in 2024, offering a window into the wide array of research undertakings that make up our field:

1. Computing and the Stigmatized: Trust, Surveillance, and Spatial Politics with the Sex Workers in Bangladesh — Pratyasha Saha, Nadira Nowsher, Ayien Utshob Baidya, Nusrat Jahan Mim, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, & SM Taiabul Haque
2. Constrained Highlighting in a Document Reader can Improve Reading Comprehension — Nikhita Joshi & Daniel Vogel
3. Cooking With Agents: Designing Context-aware Voice Interaction — Razan Jaber, Sabrina Zhong, Sanna Kuoppamäki, Aida Hosseini, Iona Gessinger, Duncan P Brumby, Benjamin R. Cowan, & Donald McMillan
4. Cosmovision Of Data: An Indigenous Approach to Technologies for Self-Determination — Carlos Guerrero Millan, Bettina Nissen, & Larissa Pschetz
5. Debate Chatbots to Facilitate Critical Thinking on YouTube: Social Identity and Conversational Style Make A Difference — Thitaree Tanprasert, Sidney S Fels, Luanne Sinnamon, & Dongwook Yoon
6. Deepfakes, Phrenology, Surveillance, and More! A Taxonomy of AI Privacy Risks — Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee, Yu-Ju Yang, Thomas Serban von Davier, Jodi Forlizzi, & Sauvik Das
7. Designing a Card-Based Design Tool to Bridge Academic Research & Design Practice For Societal Resilience — Novia Nurain, Chia-Fang Chung, Clara Caldeira, & Kay Connelly
8. Designing for Caregiver-facing Values Elicitation Tools — Pin Sym Foong, Natasha Ureyang, Charisse Foo, Sajeban Antonyrex, & Gerald Huat Choon Koh
9. Designing for Harm Reduction: Communication Repair for Multicultural Users’ Voice Interactions — Kimi Wenzel & Geoff Kaufman
10. Designing Multispecies Worlds for Robots, Cats, and Humans — Eike Schneiders, Steven David Benford, Alan Chamberlain, Clara Mancini, Simon D Castle-Green, Victor Zhi Heung Ngo, Ju Row Farr, Matt Adams, Nick Tandavanitj, & Joel E. Fischer
11. DynaVis: Dynamically Synthesized UI Widgets for Visualization Editing — Priyan Vaithilingam, Elena L. Glassman, Jeevana Priya Inala, & Chenglong Wang
12. Engaging recently incarcerated and gang affiliated Black and Latino/a young adults in designing social collocated applications for mixed reality smart glasses through community-based participatory design workshops — Richard Martinez & kurt squire
13. From Disorientation to Harmony: Autoethnographic Insights into Transformative Videogame Experiences — Jaakko Väkevä, Elisa D. Mekler, & Janne Lindqvist
14. From Exploration to End of Life: Unpacking Sustainability in Physicalization Practices Papers — Luiz Morais, Georgia Panagiotidou, Sarah Hayes, Tatiana Losev, Rebecca Noonan, & Uta Hinrichs
15. From Text to Self: Users’ Perception of AIMC Tools on Interpersonal Communication and Self — Yue Fu, Sami Foell , Xuhai “Orson” Xu, & Alexis Hiniker
16. Generative Echo Chamber? Effect of LLM-Powered Search Systems on Diverse Information Seeking — Nikhil Sharma, Q. Vera Liao, & Ziang Xiao
17. In Dice We Trust: Uncertainty Displays for Maintaining Trust in Election Forecasts Over Time — Fumeng Yang, Chloe Rose Mortenson, Erik Nisbet, Nicholas Diakopoulos, & Matthew Kay
18. JupyterLab in Retrograde: Contextual Notifications That Highlight Fairness and Bias Issues for Data Scientists — Galen Harrison, Kevin Bryson, Ahmad Emmanuel Balla Bamba, Luca Dovichi, Aleksander Herrmann Binion, Arthur Borem, & Blase Ur
19. MigraineTracker: Examining Patient Experiences with Goal-Directed Self-Tracking for a Chronic Health Condition — Yasaman S. Sefidgar, Carla L. Castillo, Shaan Chopra, Liwei Jiang, Tae Jones, Anant Mittal, Hyeyoung Ryu, Jessica Schroeder, Allison Cole, Natalia Murinova, Sean A. Munson, & James Fogarty
20. Mindfulness-based Embodied Tangible Interactions for Stroke Rehabilitation at Home — Preetham Madapura Nagaraj, Wen Mo, & Catherine Holloway
21. Mitigating Barriers to Public Social Interaction with Meronymous Communication — Nouran Soliman, Hyeonsu B Kang, Matt Latzke, Jonathan Bragg, Joseph Chee Chang, Amy X. Zhang, & David R Karger
22. Piet: Facilitating Color Authoring for Motion Graphics Video — Xinyu Shi, Yinghou Wang, Yun Wang, & Jian Zhao
23. Products of Positionality: How Tech Workers Shape Identity Concepts in Computer Vision — Morgan Klaus Scheuerman & Jed R. Brubaker
24. PsiNet: Toward Understanding the Design of Brain-to-Brain Interfaces for Augmenting Inter-Brain Synchrony — Nathan Semertzidis, Michaela Jayne Vranic-Peters, Xiao Zoe Fang, Rakesh Patibanda, Aryan Saini, Don Samitha Elvitigala, & Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller
25. rTisane: Externalizing conceptual models for data analysis increases engagement with domain knowledge and improves statistical model quality — Eunice Jun, Edward Misback, Jeffrey Heer, & Rene Just
26. Seated-WIP: Enabling Walking-in-Place Locomotion for Stationary Chairs in Confined Spaces — Liwei Chan, Tzu-Wei Mi, ZHUNG HAO HSUEH, Yi-Ci Huang, & Ming Yun Hsu
27. Sensible and Sensitive AI for Worker Wellbeing: Factors that Inform Adoption and Resistance for Information Workers — Vedant Das Swain, Lan Gao, Abhirup Mondal, Gregory D. Abowd, & Munmun De Choudhury
28. SketchPath: Using Digital Drawing to Integrate the Gestural Qualities of Craft in CAM-Based Clay 3D Printing — Devon Frost, Raina Lee, Eun-Ha Paek, & Jennifer Jacobs
29. SplitBody: Reducing Mental Workload while Multitasking via Muscle Stimulation — Romain Nith, Yun Ho, & Pedro Lopes
30. Technology-Mediated Non-pharmacological Interventions for Dementia: Needs for and Challenges in Professional, Personalized and Multi-Stakeholder Collaborative Interventions — Yuling Sun, Zhennan Yi , Xiaojuan Ma, JUNYAN MAO, & Xin Tong
31. The Metacognitive Demands and Opportunities of Generative AI — Lev Tankelevitch, Viktor Kewenig, Auste Simkute, Ava Elizabeth Scott, Advait Sarkar, Abigail Sellen, & Sean Rintel
32. Throwing Out Conventions: Reimagining Craft-Centered CNC Tool Design through the Digital Pottery Wheel — Ilan E Moyer, Sam Bourgault, Devon Frost, & Jennifer Jacobs
33. Time-Turner: A Bichronous Learning Environment to Support Positive In-class Multitasking of Online Learners — Sahar Mavali, Dongwook Yoon, Luanne Sinnamon, & Sidney S Fels
34. Touching the Moon: Leveraging Passive Haptics, Embodiment and Presence for Operational Assessments in Virtual Reality — Florian Dufresne, Tommy Nilsson, Geoffrey Gorisse, Enrico Guerra, André Zenner, Olivier Christmann, Leonie Bensch, Nikolai Anton Callus, & Aidan Cowley
35. Towards Robotic Companions: Understanding Handler-Guide Dog Interactions for Informed Guide Dog Robot Design — Hochul Hwang, Hee-Tae Jung, Nicholas A Giudice, Joydeep Biswas, Sunghoon Ivan Lee, & Donghyun Kim
36. Understanding Feedback in Rhythmic Gymnastics Training: An Ethnographic-Informed Study of a Competition Class — Leonor Portugal da Fonseca, Francisco Nunes, & Paula Alexandra Silva
37. What Counts as ‘Creative’ Work? Articulating Four Epistemic Positions in Creativity-Oriented HCI Research — Stacy Hsueh, Marianela Ciolfi Felice, Sarah Fdili Alaoui, & Wendy E. Mackay
38. ‘We Do Not Have the Capacity to Monitor All Media’: A Design Case Study on Cyber Situational Awareness in Computer Emergency Response Teams — Marc-André Kaufhold, Thea Riebe, Markus Bayer, & Christian Reuter
39. “I know I have this till my Last Breath”: Unmasking the Gaps in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Care in India — Gautami Tripathi, Medhavi Sabherwal, & Pushpendra Singh
40. “This app said I had severe depression, and now I don’t know what to do”: the unintentional harms of mental health applications — Rachael M Kang & Tera L. Reynolds

5. Conference Activity

Our flagship CHI conference remains the premier venue for HCI research. In May 2024, CHI was held in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and hosted 3,282 in-person and 708 online attendees, a total of 3,990 participants. As the CHI Conference Steering Committee (led by Cliff Lampe) found via a post-CHI conference survey, the majority of online attendees decided to attend remotely due to ecological or personal reasons. Attendees drew value from attending the conference, as it brought them up to date with scientific contributions in their field. On-site participants appreciated the opportunities for networking, while online attendees highlighted the limited opportunities for participation. Attendees were mostly able to fully access the conference, but some reported issues related to lack of food options, lack of air-conditioned spaces, and some difficulties in using the SIGCHI Programs web app. The analysis of the post-conference survey is available on our Medium publication [6].

Our 25 specialized conferences have, for the most part, recovered their activities post the pandemic, though some still experienced losses in FY24. With the transition to ACM OPEN around the corner, recent transitions to journal publishing, increased overhead, inflationary pressures, reduced sponsorship, rising geopolitical tensions, among other changes, our conferences have been working hard to assess how best to secure sustainable futures. Our portfolio of specialized conferences is also on a path to growth, and we are thankful for the efforts of Partnerships Co-Chair Keith Instone and Past President Helena Mentis towards planning this growth. We will be looking to include emergent and growing areas within HCI research, such as health, education, and critical perspectives in HCI. We look forward to making progress and reporting on these soon.

We organized the SIGCHI Futures Summit in Milan, Italy, over three days in February 2024 [7]. At this Summit, co-led by Hao-Chuan Wang, Matt Jones, Luigi De Russis, and Neha Kumar on behalf of the EC, we met with approximately 150 conference representatives and past/present/future community leaders, and discussed the challenges and opportunities confronting SIGCHI’s 26 conferences. The Summit took a participatory approach to discuss topics related to conference fundamentals, the conference experience, and conferencing reimagined. The event featured unconference sessions, breakout discussions, and plenary presentations. Participants emphasized the importance of inclusivity, transparency, and community connection. The main outcome of the event was the formalization of six focus areas: preparedness for ACM OPEN, knowledge sharing across conferences, sustainable volunteering, support for early career members, improvements in peer review, and overall transparency of processes. These will shape SIGCHI’s conference-related activities in the coming year.

CHI-in-Hawai’i (or the location of the CHI 2024 conference in Hawai’i) brought us to engage actively with our community to discuss challenges and considerations around site selection, after wildfires in Maui raised questions around our attention to the role that climate and local and regional communities play [8]. These conversations, via town halls and open sessions, motivated us to create the Site Selection Working Group led by Adriana S. Vivacqua (former VP at Large). This working group participated in the SIGCHI Futures Summit mentioned above, and conducted a survey of the SIGCHI membership with a view to making recommendations for the SIG’s 26 conferences to engage in more responsible and considered site selection.

Many more EC committees aim to serve and nurture our conferences and conference communities. In addition to the Site Selection Working Group mentioned above, there have been efforts to regularly communicate with conference leaders via the Council of Steering Committee Chairs (overseen by VP Conferences Susanne Boll), to put together a guide for organizing hybrid conferences via the Hybrid Working Group (led by Hybrid Chair Kathrin Gerling), to identify accessibility guidelines and best practices via the Accessibility Committee (see above), and more [1]. The EC and its committees have also developed additional resources and guidelines to support our conferences and publications, such as the SIGCHI Conferences Handbook, a questionnaire for conferences interested in seeking SIGCHI sponsorship, peer review best practices, blog posts on publications policies, and more.

6. Special Projects and Non-Conference Programs that Provided Service

Please refer to Section 2 regarding the SIGCHI Development Fund, Gary Marsden Travel Awards, and other DEI efforts, and Section 3 regarding the Awards Talks, as examples of initiatives that provided service. We list two additional special projects here.

The Futuring SIGCHI initiative that was started and led by Naveena Karusala supports students and early career professionals across the SIG in implementing creative pilot projects that expand the offerings and potential of the SIGCHI community, while building community and supporting leadership skills. The groups of participants in this initiative completed three projects, and will be sharing takeaways in order to integrate the projects into SIGCHI’s ongoing work (as outlined in the context of the SIGCHI Futures Summit above):

1. An event for new scholars (first-time conference attendees who have not published before) to build community and get feedback on research. This event was piloted at CSCW 2023. Takeaways from the project focused on how such events can address barriers to participation at conferences for emerging scholars and a plan for sustainability of the event.
2. An initiative to understand how we might diversify the knowledge formats used within the SIGCHI community, in order to support the reach and use of knowledge we produce. The initiative has involved community conversations around this topic and a case study of TEI as a SIGCHI conference that has shifted towards supporting creative formats. Takeaways will discuss how such a shift might be enabled within the SIGCHI community at large.
3. A podcast series on community-building and research in the Global South to expand awareness of the value of HCI globally. The team has recorded multiple episodes and takeaways will involve ideas for how the SIGCHI community might integrate them into community-building and HCI education.

The new SIGCHI Website (https://sigchi.org) is an achievement we are proud of. We brainstormed and discussed the key aspects of the SIG that we wished to highlight on our homepage, centering conferences, volunteers, and additional opportunities to participate. We are still in the process of transferring old content to the new site, fine tuning features to make it more responsive to our members’ needs, and integrating workflows that will allow painless updating. Many thanks to Abhinav Thukral, our Web Chair who has been leading this effort, and to VP Operations Kash Todi for his support.

7. Key Issues Ahead

We highlight two key issues that have our attention at present: ACM OPEN and the SIG’s financial wellbeing — particularly the financial wellbeing of our portfolio of conferences.

Preparing for ACM OPEN: ACM’s transition to 100% open access is going to impact our publishing, conferences, community, and finances, and we will need to be prepared as a SIG. We discussed this topic with our Futures Summit attendees and in dedicated online sessions with the community, thanks to the collaboration and participation of ACM staff and volunteers involved in the project at the ACM level. We have also been in communication with our community via widely circulated blog posts to drive awareness (e.g., [10]). These efforts will be amplified in the next 1.5 years.

Ensuring Financial Wellbeing: The financial pressures that our conferences have faced in recent years have led us to foreground our financial wellbeing. In June 2024, we shared the state of our finances via a detailed Medium post [10] with our community, summarizing our commitments and offering explanations where helpful, covering the last two fiscal years. The EC has broken down and analyzed the SIG’s finances to chart next steps: we look forward to a self-sustaining CHI conference series, supporting and ensuring the financial strength of specialized conferences, and managing the SIG’s own spending with care to ensure maximum value to our membership as we see it.

References

1. SIGCHI: All Committees. https://sigchi.org/people/all-committees/
2. SIGCHI Development Fund. https://sigchi.org/resources/sigchi-development-fund/
3. SIGCHI Development Fund Guidelines. https://sigchi.org/resources/guides-for-organizers/sigchi-development-fund-guidelines/
4. Gary Marsden Travel Awards. https://sigchi.org/resources/gary-marsden-travel-awards/
5. Elmqvist, N. (2024, March 1). Announcing the 2024 ACM SIGCHI Awards. https://medium.com/sigchi/announcing-the-2024-acm-sigchi-awards-8cac7abda8be
6. Appert, C. (2024, July 26). CHI 24: Overview of the Post-Conference Survey. https://medium.com/sigchi/chi-24-overview-of-the-post-conference-survey-c8cb846b35cc
7. Kumar, N. (2024, February 28). About the SIGCHI Futures Summit. https://medium.com/sigchi/about-the-sigchi-futures-summit-4e6717a406ce
8. Kumar, N. (2023, September 1). About CHI in Hawai’i. https://medium.com/sigchi/about-chi-in-hawaii-a0db01c90a95
9. Kumar, N. (2023, November 27). About ACM OPEN. https://medium.com/sigchi/about-acm-open-cd544408559c
10. Kumar, N. (2024, June 10). On SIGCHI Finances. https://medium.com/sigchi/on-sigchi-finances-ad2b38ca3454

Photo by Elaine Casap on Unsplash