SIGCHI Equity Talks #4: Infrastructuring Equity
Neha Kumar & Shaowen Bardzell (VPs at Large)
Previous Equity Talk Summary: Reviewing & Mentorship
All Equity Talks (running March through June, 2021)
The roundtable session began with introductions, first from the two of us (Neha Kumar and Shaowen Bardzell, VPs at Large), as we also shared our motivations for hosting this roundtable, and then from Cale Passmore, who starting us off on these two threads and a question:
…these systems that we put in place or failed to put in place, like the travel awards, development funds, SIGCHI chapters, and that’s what we’re taking a close look at during the session. So to name the problem, what do you think is or are the most pressing problems we face regarding equity in the context of the infrastructures that you’re part of, that you’re working toward the success of? And absolutely anyone is welcome to start us off here.
On Conferences
We spent a good amount of time discussing conferences as infrastructures, and the need for greater transparency of costs. Andy Dearden brought up the cost of participating in conferences and Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy (AC for Equity) responded in her role as IMX general chair and VP for conferences on the IMX steering committee. She explained that the goal was to ensure that the money going towards the venue, food/drink, and swag could be covered by the registration revenue. Going virtual meant that this expense would be less, making the conference more inclusive, but platform providers are relatively more expensive. To broaden participation, rates for students and/or “economically developing countries” can help. Such costs can be covered, for instance, by the SIGCHI Development Fund. Geraldine Fitzpatrick added that the CHI2021 general chairs had written a blog post detailing what was covered in the registration fees, and the conference budget, in case it helped.
We also discussed virtual and hybrid models of participation. Andy noted that remote participation was important “for people to avoid the costs of hotels and international travel (not to mention the carbon footprint).” He asked, “Can we make virtual participation an option available for every conference?” Many others were in support, and Nicci Gafinowitz also asked: “Will ACMs ability to be so financially flexible continue when (if) physical conferences return?” Kagonya Awori pointed out: “Use of bandwidth-heavy and/or mobile-unfriendly conferencing tools serves to sideline participation from mobile-first individuals and economies.” Vinoba asserted that the thing to make sure would be that this did not become a two-tiered experience for participants.
Regarding costs of attending, Joseph Lindley asked if anyone had used a “pay what you can” approach, inviting Kashyap Todi’s question, “How about don’t pay if you cannot instead?” Vinoba described Mozilla’s approach, where it gives a recommended payment — you pay more if you can, and if you can’t pay then you don’t pay. She noted that it takes a position of privilege to be able to do this sort of pricing. For example, BBC does free conferences and get-togethers where a topic is chosen and attendees can join in and attend for free. She added that there are interesting models that we should think about, but everything costs money and if the money is not coming from attendees’ registration, it is coming from elsewhere: “There’s always going to be that give and take I think.”
Cale pointed out that although we want conferences to be more accessible and therefore cheaper, that also would require more volunteer effort, more free labor, more industry involvement, and these are things that are equally protested or problematic in their own right. So finding or striking a balance between those dynamics is critical. Julie Williamson (Executive Vice-President) added that decoupling registration from presentation could be helpful, so that the cost of publishing could still be accounted for without making attendance at a conference mandatory. She also shared a blog post to this effect. Soraia Prietch (AC for Accessibility) asked if potential participants could vote on what efforts and resources would be better than others, e.g., more accessibility accommodations than expensive hotels to host the event.
Geraldine remarked on the CHI conference, having chaired CHI 2019 and served on the steering committee. Although she agreed with the call for more virtual and hybrid conference formats, she also stressed that the CHI conference was a challenging one to think about making any of these changes quickly:
Because of the scale of the conference, there are very few sites worldwide that take the numbers that we have and the mix of rooms that we need. And we’re already in the process of trying to book venues for 2026, or the people who are involved in that. And that’s risky because we don’t know what are going to be the current models then either. And I wonder whether some of these alternative models, whether it’s hybrid and/or different sort of registration models are really good models to explore in some of the smaller conferences where the risks might be a little bit lower and the financial risk more manageable, because those financial implications are carried a lot by SIGCHI generally and will affect lots of the conferences and lots of the support programs that are available. So one of my concerns about hybrid, just hearing what the costs are involved in running a virtual platform, those costs are huge […] And so if we’re having a hybrid, we could end up, I don’t know inadvertently having conferences that are even more expensive because we’ve got to get all the physical infrastructure booked x years ahead and we don’t really know how to anticipate the numbers and all of the virtual infrastructure to provide an equitable conference experience for those online. Someone said in the comments that it’s not a two-tier experience. So I guess I’m just trying to say it’s really complicated, it’s really complicated. And no one is doing this trying to make money or trying to screw people. In fact, everyone’s doing all their very best to keep costs as low as possible and we never know how many registrations we’re going to get. I know when we had CHI 2019 for example, we had like the bare bones that we just had to have for the conference. And then you have the whole wishlist of things you want to have ideally and then slowly, as you start to see the registration numbers come in you can go, “yay, we can do two biscuits, two cookies for people at morning tea instead of one” or something like that. It sounds trivial, but they’re the sorts of little incremental add-ons that you can do and it’s always this juggling act. So I just wonder whether some of the smaller conferences might be ways of exploring some of the practical logistics of this and to test the willingness of people, I don’t know, to pay as you can or whatever. But for something bigger like CHI or CSCW, it might be a slower change process. And we don’t know. I’m sure we’re going to come out of this whole COVID experience with different confidence levels, but what they’ll be I don’t know.
Elisa Rubegni shared that the IDC conference in 2020 had been held fully online, and there were enough resources to support those who could not afford to attend: “We had the widest and largest participation compared to previous years and positive budget for ACM. Online conferences can improve the ability of people to participate and make it more affordable.” Vinoba also remarked that there might be value in going virtual one year and going physical the next, to combine the best of both worlds.
On Volunteering
Katta Spiel brought up a concern around the cost of volunteering (also when one is reimbursed later, which hurts students who may not be in a position to pay up front). Susan Dray added that the cost of volunteering was a bigger deal outside of academia, where “service is done on stolen time.” She said, “And when I was self-employed, every hour I spent on SIGCHI was an hour I did not work or get paid. So I could not do a lot of things that took a lot of time, like chairing a conference. This further perpetuates the lack of industry folks in SIGCHI especially in leadership. And I feel this schism between academia and industry is quite problematic. And the cost of volunteering is a significant difference.” Even in academia, time spent on service is time spent away from a PhD, from finding additional funding, getting coursework done, etc., Cale affirmed.
On Infrastructures and Risk-Taking
Alex Taylor voiced that infrastructure was “actually what lies at the heart of many problems with equity.” He asked: “What at an infrastructural level do we start to change?” He linked this to risk-taking, asking how we might approach risk differently, and show willingness to experiment, such as with smaller conferences as Geraldine suggested, for reorienting ourselves to structural issues. As editors-in-chief of Interactions, Alex mentioned that he, Daniela Rosner, and Mikael Wiberg had been thinking a lot about the “conditions of possibility”, as a phrase to think with. He added: “And it’s like what can that phrase allow us to do at the structural level to try and to understand problems of equity differently? So every one of these issues around registration, payment, etc. I think should come with a certain attitude towards equity, a certain approach for risk-taking, experimentation etc.” Daniela also added to this: “Not to take us away from conferences, but I think really as a way of disseminating ideas and conceptions of how we can change the infrastructure or take risks in new ways. It would be important, I think, to hear from more of you as to how you might use interactions or similar kinds of platforms to do some of that discussion work or debate work and how we can better support you in that facility and capacity.” Alex affirmed that Interactions was a platform where “we’re keen to take risks and create the conditions for different kinds of worlds. In other words, we’re open to experimentation.”
To this point, Susan added that it made sense to focus on infrastructures other than conferences, such as Interactions, and Katta said that having published the suggestion for phrasing gender questions and surveys in Interactions had been one of the most effective things to make a non-binary perspective public across disciplines.
On Representation
Nic Bidwell asked how we could ensure that everyone felt represented with our structures, and if we needed more people representing us to ensure that diversity was well accounted for. For example, she noted, that many in Africa would not feel as represented as those in the US.
Kagonya Awori pointed out a related challenge that arises when our structures cannot distinguish between geographies with more nuance. Being a researcher at Microsoft Research in Kenya, she mentioned that being Kenyan, in Kenya, her registration fee for CHI 2021 was much lower than for Microsoft employees located elsewhere, because of the category in which Kenya was placed:
And to cut the long story short, whatever I was meant to pay was much, much significantly lower than the standard fee. But then again it’s not me paying, it’s my company paying. So you see that disconnect, right? What I’m trying to attend to is this direct grouping according to geographical location as opposed to the person, right? So I want to shift from that because I think sometimes we are often categorized as the less than or the poor ones, and it gets a bit tiring and exhausting. So I think what I’d recommend is please just […] let us choose. I like the pay what you can or do not pay if you cannot proposals, because it always appears that “the less-thans, the poor ones will pay this much” is not a complete representation. It can be an individual in London who would prefer to pay $45 as opposed to $210 for example. So I think that is an approach and I like talking about let’s be daring to try new things, let us embrace the individuality of people and maybe that will help things better. Another thing I like and I think Nic mentioned this is around encouraging participation. […] I like that the payment structure is really attending to encouraging participation from all corners. I’m just wondering what more we can do and I’m happy to contribute to that whether it’s time wise or whatever, whatever we can do. So when we’re having these discussions about encouraging participation from certain pockets of people, we can have the people from those pockets actually take part in those discussions, so it then doesn’t seem like it is a decision made for them without them, because it then might end up being confusing, like it was to me choosing the wrong category that it’s not me paying. So it’s actually my boss Jacki O’Neill [who] was like, “No actually. You don’t choose that one. You don’t have to choose that, right?” And the funny thing is it’s not like if I didn’t work for Microsoft I would not have afforded to pay whatever the amount it was, it’s just that if you’re going to give me a cheaper option, then I’ll take it? I guess I’m just exhausted of always being categorized as less-than and I’m not. So I think that’s it. Like as a Black African woman, I’m not — even the word privilege, I have something against that. So it’s not that I’m the unprivileged. I’m not the picture of not privileged, I’m just a person. I’m a researcher and I’m enjoying coexistence like many of you are. So I think we should find a way of separating geography and race and gender from all these other structures that we’re trying to make equitable.
To this point, Alex added: “These inequities run through many of our infrastructures in so many ways. We’re never going to solve them, but we need to think together about allowing for difference in many ways. Management is always a site for structures of inequity, and decoupling gender, geography, and race from infrastructures, so taking a person-first approach or situation-specific approach.”
A Sli.do comment also pointed out that there was a chicken-and-egg issue with representation, that when people did not feel represented they would not volunteer and the gulf would widen.
On Structural Change
Tess shared her experience of doing equity work and advocacy within our community:
I’m not sure if I have a question so much as a perspective that has become increasingly clear to me as I’ve seen our community from these different roles. And the reason I ended up in the role of VP of pubs is because I made a nuisance of myself to the ACM, because I’m a transgender woman who wanted to change her name on her previously published work and was denied the opportunity to do so by the ACM systems and platforms and policies. And I was able to join an ongoing effort that a few other transgender individuals had started within our community but then had gotten burned out on because of the work of trying to advocate for change inside of our community can be exhausting and emotionally taxing and labor-intensive. It’s thankless, it’s unpaid, it’s challenging. And I was fortunate enough to be at a point in my life and career where I could take on a lot of extra labor to help develop policies, to help push policies forward. And I’ve been able to make some changes to how we approach these issues. And in the process, I’ve learned that in order to change our infrastructures, we often need to change our social consensus around what we consider equitable as a community. And this is something that I encounter a lot as a member of the executive committee or of CARES, where people come to us with a concern or a complaint or some difficulty they’re facing whether it be with a reviewing process or with some aspect of PCS. And the concern and the complaint often assumes some degree of power or authority on the part of the folks who are in service and responsibility positions within our community. It assumes that the executive committee has the power to repair that for them, that CARES has the ability to in some way provide a solution to the problem that they’re encountering. And yet from the other side, we encounter time and again, that actually we have virtually no power to make changes. And that the only times we change things at the level of the institution, the level of the ACM, is when we produce a large enough consensus within our community and the broader public conversation around those things to actually produce a real change. And so for the name-change policy — in order for me to apply enough pressure to the ACM to get an inclusive name change policy produced, I first had to write an article in the spring of nature advocating for this. I had to join the committee of publication ethics and create a working group that was offering guidance to all the publishers underneath their umbrella. I had to form my own separate working group of over 50 people across a myriad of disciplines all applying pressure to their publishers. And I had to essentially change the global consensus on whether or not the publishing community was willing to accommodate inclusive name change practices. And we did this, and it’s working, and we’re applying pressure. And we’re now hitting the ceiling of ACM doesn’t have the resources or the budget to actually follow through with the policies that we’ve adopted. And we’re struggling with the fact that no matter how good our intentions are, if our institution isn’t willing to resource those intentions, they fall flat. I’m seeing a number of posts from women in the chat who are observing things like name changes are something that are desirable and valuable and beneficial to not just trans people but to anybody who changes their name throughout their life in their career which is many of us. And so I think it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the way that power is related to our infrastructures and the ways in which our infrastructures are reflections of systems of power. And we as a community lack any kind of institutional power beyond that which we’re able to produce a consensus around or behind. And so when it comes to infrastructure and equity, we have to build coalitions, we have to build big groups and those have to extend beyond the CHI community into the broader academic and scholarly community, because that’s how we get the power that we need to hold our institutions accountable. And so I don’t know whether there’s a question here, but just the perspective that I’ve come to […] blood, sweat, and tears over the last couple of years.
Cale asked attendees to speak on “structures of accountability, maybe more democratic infrastructures or more lateralised infrastructures, opportunities that might be missed, reasons, that sort of inaccessibility to structural and systemic change.”
Nic brought up two points in this regard. First, “about the numbers of people that may need to represent us. I mean obviously we can’t all be on every sort of structure. But at the moment this pointy top is pretty pointy compared to the numbers of people in SIGCHI right? So it could be a little bit softer, more curvy-shaped at the top rather than a real point. So I wonder how people feel about that. It’s possible they haven’t had experiences with that type of structure, but certainly working with community networks and communities I got more experience and it’s not nearly as scary as you might think it is. Does work sometimes.” Second, she reiterated Alex’s citation of Sara Ahmed regarding “the need to make space for the killjoys and complainers” and to reward them, because in her own experience she had incurred big penalties for being one of them. She emphasized that it was important to reward people who had engaged in the kind of emotional labor that Tess (or others on the call) had.
Stay tuned to hear more from Tess and our other roundtable attendees on the topic of gender inequities in our report from SIGCHI Equity Talk #5.
