SIGCHI Equity Talks #8: SIGCHI Across Chapters
Eunice Sari (outgoing Vice-President for Chapters)
Neha Kumar (outgoing Vice-President at Large, incoming President)
Previous Equity Talk Summary: The Future of SIGCHI
All Equity Talks (running March through August, 2021)
This roundtable began with us hearing an introduction from Neha Kumar (outgoing Vice-President at Large) about the Equity Talks series. Eunice Sari (outgoing Vice-President for Chapters), the lead organizer of this session, then described her role as VP Chapters since 2018 and on the Asian Development Committee before that. She emphasized that each of the chapters has different needs, and one size does not fit all. Cale Passmore then went over the code of conduct, as at the start of each session. We summarize our discussion below, having seeded it with these four questions:
- Naming the Problem(s): What are the challenges that chapters find themselves facing in being a part of SIGCHI that SIGCHI could better address?
- Fostering Solidarity: What might a more inclusive, supportive infrastructure and culture within SIGCHI look like for supporting chapters?
- Identifying Nuance: What are some barriers chapters might face in this regard? How do these impact different chapters differently?
- Actions Towards Change: Where does the responsibility for change lie, and what actions can and should SIGCHI take to effect this change?
Re-examining/Reimagining SIGCHI Membership
The first question discussed was about a request to comment on the map displayed in a recent blog post written by Regina Bernhaupt (outgoing Vice-President for Membership and Communications) on “SIGCHI Membership Becomes International”. As Regina was not present, the panelists and moderator tried their best to understand the content of the post by quickly reading through it.
Eunice commented on the text under the map where she found her name. The post noted that “SIGCHI chapters are key to success”, and that the number of members in Indonesia had grown considerably in recent years, thanks to Eunice’s efforts. Eunice then shared her experience of starting the first SIGCHI chapter in Indonesia in 2015, with her colleague Josh Tedjasaputra (also present). At the time, SIGCHI and ACM were much less known than other professional associations like IEEE in many parts of Southeast Asia, like Indonesia. Here, Eunice and Josh organized the annual international ACM In-Cooperation Conference in HCI and UX named CHIuXiD, which attracted thousands of attendees in the Asia-Pacific region as well as around the world, including academics (junior and senior), practitioners, and “pracademics”. Many HCI experts from the global ACM SIGCHI community attended, gave keynote talks and workshops, and published in this annual conference. Eunice shared that, through CHIuXiD, there have been many new research works from the Global South published in the ACM Digital Library. This has directly impacted the growth of chapters and membership in Indonesia as well as in the general region.
Soraia Prietch (outgoing AC for Accessibility), from the Brazilian chapter, shared that chapters were important because that was a way for her to know about other researchers in her country. However, there was a feeling of isolation as well, and with that a desire to know more about other chapters, especially to know what might be possible to do in one’s own chapter. She recognized that Eunice had made a lot of effort to organize chapter meetings, and added:
“This is really good, because we meet with people from everywhere. But not often, I can’t participate. I would like to do more. […] I mean, if the meetings had these — I don’t know — minutes, or a blog post, something about the meeting, would make it a lot easier to keep up with what people were doing, no? I think we should be articulate between us. It would make it a lot easier to know what we can do, what people are doing. I feel kind of isolated.” — Soraia Prietch
Cale asserted that this was a need that had been expressed several times across the Equity Talks, the need for transparency, to be “asynchronously in the know.” Upon his invitation, Adriana Vivacqua (outgoing AC for Equity) shared her experience:
“I think this is a really important issue, and I think this is something that, as we start the Latin America regional committee, we are looking to do, to articulate with chapters and between them. […] But again, this is at a regional level. So right now, we’re focusing on how do we work with chapters to help create and grow this community. And I think, also […] the whole plurality thing, I think it’s really important that we have these conversations like these types of things so we understand what the issues are for each other. I like to sit in and listen so I know what’s going on in other people’s heads and realities that are different from mine. And then, I can stop and think about this and say, OK, how can I address this? Or how can I deal with this? So I think this type of roundtable thing is important, and it’s something that, as we get organized, we’re hoping that we’ll be able to promote a little bit in the community in Latin America. So we want to get to know more people and to know how we can help grow the community in the region, so to speak. […] I do think these regional committees can be a good way to help organize chapters at a different level. Because we’re not creating new things, I guess. We’re looking for the existing structures and trying to weave them together and get them to collaborate if possible.”
— Adriana Vivacqua
Cale invited others to share ideas for how we could “weave chapters together”. Aaron Quigley (CHI 2021 General Co-Chair) commented on the map in Regina’s blog post, saying that the current SIGCHI membership did not represent the full extent of the global HCI community. He added:
“So, across the 24 conferences, there’s about 10,000 delegates attending. [This year at CHI] there are 5,147 people attending. If you look at the number of students and practitioners who download research publications from SIGCHI, it’s tens of thousands of people. And if you look at the number of people who engage on social media, if you look at the number of people who are actually making use of the research, and the findings, and the educational outputs from the community, it’s much bigger than the few thousand SIGCHI members. So when I see that picture of where the memberships are, it makes me think about where are the hidden corners, where are the emerging communities, where are the growing user groups, or the growing membership. Because I don’t think SIGCHI membership itself fully captures the true extent. […] And that’s why I think chapters are interesting, because […] you meet huge numbers of very committed individuals who are part of chapters, and have no interest in being part of SIGCHI itself or the ACM, but they are still incredibly important members of the global HCI community. And I think that’s the challenge for SIGCHI is that just membership alone is not what we’re thinking of. We’re thinking of these bigger, broader constituencies of individuals who are part of the global HCI community.” — Aaron Quigley
Cale stressed here the importance of scrutinizing the disconnect between the SIGCHI membership and the HCI research community. Neha added that there were both false negatives and false positives, that is, not all people who were members were active in the SIGCHI community and vice versa. She suggested rethinking membership from scratch, and questioning what SIGCHI membership really offers, and how there were different questions that were salient here: “What does membership of a chapter look like? How is that different from membership of SIGCHI? And how is that different from membership of the ACM? And I think that is work that we need to do — to communicate clearly what is membership really going to offer?”
Rucha Tulaskar from the Mumbai chapter agreed that these distinctions were really important to draw, and that we needed to “rethink, or think about ACM as a community”. She added that different people play different roles, and that the needs of professionals and researchers might be best to consider separately. She added that students come from diverse backgrounds, and we could think about what SIGCHI could offer them through membership, so that they would be more willing to join. Eunice also agreed that it could be confusing to know the difference between ACM and SIGCHI. She suggested that SIGCHI membership could offer an automatic membership to certain chapters, and that there could be much more conversation and connection between chapters to promote better understanding around SIGCHI as well as overall growth. Cale read the comments in the chat, where many attendees affirmed that SIGCHI membership (and its benefits) were confusing. For example, Aaron highlighted the many hats one might wear: “ACM, versus SIGCHI, versus SIGCHI chapter membership, versus conference delegate, versus community member, versus reviewer, versus organizer.”
Navigating the Languages of SIGCHI
Highlighting the different labels that might possibly be assigned to members, as Aaron noted above, Cale moved us towards discussing language. This was an issue that has come up quite often, throughout our Equity Talks. Soraia asked: “Should we think of providing information on (SIGCHI membership) in different formats and languages? I’m sure all chapters would be happy to translate for their/our countries.” Cale emphasized: “This is something that’s come up again and again and again, on how might we be able to actually be more inclusive when it comes to regional differences and language? Translation, interpreters have come up in the past. I mean, the UN can do it, they have technologies for it, and we are an HCI community.”
Neha shared that from talking to the Operations team it was clear that there were some ways in which we could support different languages. For example, Soraia had done her video for the CHI 2021 Town Hall in Portuguese, with English subtitles. Could there be other ways of supporting diverse languages, Neha asked.
There were a number of related comments in chat. For example, Naomi Yamashita mentioned: “Some conferences seem to offer language support for non-native English authors when they submit papers. Could this be something we think about?” Susan Dray added, “Could chapters organize a special issue of interactions that was in a local language? For example, at the SIGCHI Across Borders session in Guatemala City several years ago, we discussed having a Spanish issue, or at least a section. Doing this in a blog post isn’t the same thing.” To this point, Neha added that Interactions had been increasingly welcoming of content that was translated and available in English and another language.
Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy (Vino; outgoing AC for Equity) also had a few things to add. First, that translation work needed to be sustainable, so that it could be repeated on a yearly basis. So adding to the budget for operations and translating into popular languages could be one way forward. Then again, she pointed out, we could be strategic about the languages we translate to, and consider:
“…where you can have the most impact in terms of translating different things. So academic papers might not be your immediate choice. It could be keynotes at conferences, it could be instructions on how to do things, things that are vitally important and also inspirational, perhaps, might be the things that you choose to translate to different languages. Get people hooked in, and then decide how you might evolve that service. So whatever the method is, there needs to be a strategic thinking to say, these are the ways we want to translate, and these other ways we want to include people. Otherwise, beyond the next, sort of the incumbent, EC, all that just fails and falls down, and it’s not a sustainable process.”
— Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy
Sustaining Chapter Growth
Eunice pointed us to a slightly different challenge around language, which was the language around HCI and UX, and how UX was a term that many more people were familiar with. She added: “And I think this is something that we really need to work more about this, because a lot of the students there, when they graduate, they probably do not need to go to the academy. They need to go to the industry.” She suggested that supporting more industry events, for example through the SIGCHI Development Fund, could promote more chapter growth, and ultimately benefit SIGCHI.
Melissa Densmore shared her experience from the ProteaCHI chapter in South Africa: “As a newer chapter in a region without a cohesive HCI identity, we offer free membership to everyone interested in the ProteaCHI chapter. I haven’t yet pushed SIGCHI or ACM membership. Members are hesitant about the perceived Americanness of ACM. I feel it would be detrimental to the community to strengthen that tie beyond the formal international affiliation. ProteaCHI as a SIGCHI chapter enables us to lend our support to AfriCHI conference, for conference funds and summer schools. My overarching goal for the chapter is to build community around HCI in the country to bridge industry, practice, research, teaching efforts, and to just get to know the other HCI researchers here.”
Vino backed Melissa’s point to acknowledge that different chapters, located in different regions, all may have very different needs. She stressed the importance of regions learning from each other and encouraging them to “sort of just make us less American.” She also pointed out that we might need to consider what policies we create for chapters, given that they are so different:
“I would rather [have] a policy where someone goes, my chapter needs more industry involvement, and therefore, these are the policies that I would like funding or support or help with. And then the next chapter comes up and says, I actually need local mentorship, and therefore, those are the funding or support mechanisms that you give for that particular chapter. And so your policy, or the way you build structural change has to also somehow build in ways to get that local, individual sort of chance that you get from specific chapters. Otherwise, again, we are just making policy for the sake of policy, and it’s not really taking care of the problem.” — Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy
Student chapters are harder to sustain than professional chapters. Eunice talked about this issue and stressed the importance of mentorship:
“So what actually we have to work on, in my opinion, is to work with the mentor. And then, the mentor — actually someone that we need to treat not as just a person to sign off, but as the person who is the champion to create new chapters, to recruit more people. And we haven’t done much on that one, because we are just so happy to have a lot of students, and then new student chapters, but yeah, I think it is a good time to think about the sustainability of that, especially kind of like I’m thinking of creating a program actually for the mentors and for the existing officers. Giving them like an idea, maybe one day becoming like a chapter leader. […] So basically, it is just helping the chapter to pass the baton to the new people, because this problem is actually not just the student chapter, but also the professional chapters. When someone finishes, and then a lot of time, like a lot of people say, OK, done, my job done. I got what I want, and […] then the chapter dies and we cut the chapter. And this is something that’s quite sad, but there should be a way to help this, process the mechanism.”
— Eunice Sari
Josh Tedjasaputra added that it was important to think about student chapters in this way, and Susan mentioned: “In our chapter here in MN, we had a shadowing structure. You’d be their chair in training who’d become the chair the following year. Same thing for UXPA conferences that help the continuity.”
Others also made suggestions for supporting chapters, on the chat. For example, Aaron mentioned: “…with the videos in the town hall, there could be open space for chapters to showcase their work with videos, which can be opened globally. These videos can be used as ways to showcase and draw in international members who want to connect, present, build links with chapters, such as the video program.”
We concluded with Cale handing it over to Neha to give a quick invitation to the next Equity Talk the following week, on Making SIGCHI Sustainable. Eunice invited everyone in the audience to engage more in conversations around chapters, through various social media channels including the new SIGCHI Chapters Discord server.
