SIGCHI Equity Talks #9: Making SIGCHI Sustainable
Chris Clarke (University of Bath, UK)
Jason Jacques (University of Cambridge, UK)
Bridget Kane (Karlstad University, Sweden)
Neha Kumar (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
Kelly Widdicks (Lancaster University, UK)
Kristin Williams (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Previous Equity Talk Summary: SIGCHI Across Chapters
All Equity Talks (running March through August, 2021)
The roundtable began with introductions from all organizers (Chris Clarke, Jason Jacques, Bridget Kane, Kelly Widdicks, Kristin Williams, and Neha Kumar), where we shared our backgrounds and interest in sustainability. Cale Passmore, our moderator, then went over the code of conduct for the roundtable. We had seeded our discussion with the following questions:
- Naming the Problem(s): Where are we failing when it comes to making SIGCHI sustainable, and what has hindered sustainable efforts in the SIGCHI community thus far?
- Fostering Solidarity: What might a more inclusive, supportive infrastructure and culture within SIGCHI look like for supporting sustainable choices?
- Identifying Nuance: What are some barriers to participation in this regard? How do these impact different participants differently, based on different positionalities and life circumstances?
- Actions Towards Change: Where does the responsibility for change lie, and what actions can and should SIGCHI take to effect this change?
Our roundtable session saw great participation from a total of 50–60 attendees. We discussed various aspects of conferences, such as conference travel, publishing, industry sponsorships, networking opportunities, and more. We also discussed how important it is to bring the community together to enact change, and brainstormed some potential avenues for change. Based on this discussion, we co-authored a call for an Adjunct Chair (AC) for Sustainability at the SIGCHI level; this is listed below and will be live shortly.
1. Conferences and Sustainability: “How big is our footprint?”
Conferences are at the heart of what we do as a research community, but finding an environmentally friendly way of doing our academic business is a central sustainability challenge. We discussed in depth the challenge of minimizing the footprint of the SIGCHI community for when physical, in-person conferences return. Kristin stressed the importance of gathering data at conferences to better understand “how big is our footprint” — or the impact of our conferences — in categories of travel, reusable materials, energy use, food choices, and more. She remarked that it was challenging to assess tradeoffs when it came to “what gets measured, how does it get measured, and how valid are those measurements” as well as how we move forward with this data. Andy Dearden asked what the “big ticket items” were in this list, if this analysis had offered such an understanding. Kristin acknowledged that flights are known big contributors from prior literature; Chris added that flight emissions were a function of where the conference was held, who was in attendance (as Jason has written about in his CHI 2020 alt.chi contribution).
In terms of arriving at a baseline footprint for our conferences, Kristin shared, there was more data collection to be done. Chris stressed the need to ask and decide “what’s [conference attendance] worth to the community and how can we achieve similar outcomes with a much reduced carbon footprint.” He shared a link to ACM SIGPLAN’s climate change report, which presents ideas for reducing the carbon footprint of conferences. He also posed this important challenge to the group: “We as a community have a decision to make. Is attending the conference more important than the environmental impact of that conference?”
Chris also asserted the importance of having sustainability chairs who can actively be engaged with prioritizing a much reduced carbon footprint while achieving similar outcomes. In response to a question asked on Sli.do: “At what point does the role of a sustainability expert become relevant when planning a SIGCHI conference, whether it’s a big conference like CHI or a smaller one like CSCW?”, Matthew Mauriello emphasized that “sustainability chairs are always relevant no matter the size of the conference. They should always be a consideration.”
2. Reimagining the SIGCHI Conference Format
To reduce our dependence on conference travel, we discussed suggestions to promote smaller regional, localized, and chapter-based conferences as well as virtual, hybrid, and geo-distributed conferences.
Bridget suggested building connected regional conferences in which geographically dispersed local conferences were able to connect with other local conferences. For example, “you know, a group of people in Stockholm or Melbourne and connecting with others in San Francisco or Tokyo.” Kristin reminded us that such a globally distributed model might cut off access to global research networks, and some members of our community may be impacted more than others in that process.
On the flip side, Michael Muller described social inequities arising from COVID, such as those who have suffered health effects or are not able to be vaccinated. He projected that these inequities will prevent several potential conference attendees from being able to attend and could impact attendance for years. This would make virtual attendance or hybrid formats appealing for those impacted. Chris supported Michael’s point, stating: “the low cost; the ease of access to virtual conferences was quite significant. People have caregiving responsibilities. They can’t take off the time to travel. They can’t afford to travel”. These points were readily agreed to in chat: “hybrid or virtual formats could also be inclusive to people who do not have the funds to travel” (Elina Eriksson). She added that the carbon cost was also significant for her: “One reason why I haven’t been attending CHI for a while is the carbon emission from flying. And, partly because I feel uncomfortable of the overarching vibe of ‘more is better’, not least through all the industrial perspectives”. While some people consider conference travel a major perk of their job, as Adrian Friday mentioned, others actively avoid larger conferences for this very reason (Cale).
Michael Muller added that virtual conferences that were smaller offered better opportunities for exchange. Of CHI 2021, he said: “it was more like a trade show in which the speakers are a special class of participants and the remainder of us were merely audience”. Michael contrasted CHI with IUI saying, it was “a much smaller conference but it was also much more egalitarian. There were speakers, but the audience was much more present. And the discussion and presentation were much more of a conversation.” Neha amplified Michael’s point by describing her experiences with CHI PLAY and CSCW as being positive and inclusive.
Judy van Biljon described how the remote nature of the virtual conference introduces conflicts: “The online experience is impacted by the fact that researchers are often still keeping up with their other duties. Would it make more sense to adjust the program? For example, all panelists on one day so it’s easier to dedicate the time to stay engaged.” This is not merely a question of time management but also about making sure one is able to clear one’s headspace to be able to engage fully. Chris also stressed the importance of ensuring that virtual participation, especially in hybrid formats, did not translate to second-rate attendance. To this end, Kelly suggested: “we are experts in human-computer interaction so surely we can figure out some way of making it really exciting for people to join virtually.”
There is an opportunity, when rethinking the conference format, to consider what the benefits of attending/not attending are, how researcher relationships are nurtured, and what the impact ends up being on our research practice. For example, Bridget highlighted that “it’s very hard to measure the spark you get when you… bump into someone while you’re at coffee and you get an idea for the next big project.” We have a difficult time accounting for these features of in-person conferences that contribute to advancing our field. Kristin pointed out that “mixing with people from other cultures and countries can have very real impact [on what] you think about these things and your research; but also about the scientific community or what you even think a good research question is for the community or for the globe.” The conference structures the relationships that fuel research.
Kashyap Todi cautioned: “we are kind of jumping the gun to switching to fully virtual or hybrid and [he] was wondering whether we can take these initial steps to reducing our impact instead.” Cale further pointed out that there is a non-trivial environmental impact from having a virtual conference too and it’s not the case that being virtual completely eliminates our environmental impact.
3. Taking a Holistic View: Across and Beyond SIGCHI
Adrian proposed adopting a holistic view of the community’s carbon budget. Instead of focusing on reducing the footprint of each conference, he asserted: “If you want to have a large effect… then what you need to do is think about how many conferences is reasonable.” Along these lines, Chris highlighted that conference attendance, networking, and publishing are all intertwined, and also impact conferences’ carbon footprints. Cale pointed to an article by Julie Williamson that suggests separating publication fees from conference attendance fees, which could be a mechanism for reducing dependence on conference travel for publishing. Adrian and Elina agreed that conferences offered important networking and collaboration opportunities, especially to early career researchers. Elina also shared her research findings from looking at carbon emissions at KTH Sweden, that “the ones that fly are the more senior researchers. And if you look at the distribution on flying at the university it’s an extremely unfair distribution basically. So there’s a few who fly tremendous amounts… and then there are a vast majority who don’t fly or fly very little.” Cale affirmed that socioeconomic inequities echo through the university status and career stage of researchers, further pointing to the need to consider a holistic view.
Later in the session, participants brought up the tensions of taking conference sponsorship from, or collaborating with, highly energy-intensive organizations in the technology industry. Nic Bidwell asked, “Are there any models to show the relative impact of changing an industry? For example, in general versus individual community responsibility: um [I] was thinking if we aren’t influencing the big consumers, maybe our smaller efforts aren’t really effective.” Elina responded to Nic by describing the large shift she was seeing in Swedish industry: “Recently the International Energy […] Agency, they had a report that stated that from this year, there shouldn’t be any more investments in oil fields or coal mines. That, coming from them, is pretty, pretty aggressive, because they have been very vague earlier on. In Sweden today, I got the message on my phone, that they [suggested] that from 2040 it should be forbidden to sell diesel or gasoline. And that’s in a fairly short period of time.”
Nic remarked that while we should be changing how we run conferences, “We can’t not talk about the elephant in the room, because the career destinations, the money, the collaborations, and partnerships, the papers that we accept from our industry partners. Those things are gigantic compared to what the conference itself uses. So, I sort of feel like, that this has to be — we have to keep it on the table all the time.” Our attendees were unclear on how best to do this. On the one hand, the sustainability chair is, in part, an activist role and should be positioned to speak with industry partners who use substantial environmental resources and say, “Look if you want to come to our conference, what are you going to do about XYZ? And not necessarily have it solved in a year, but have that conversation. Make it part and parcel of the sustainability mission” (Nic). On the other hand, we could also approach our funders as partners in “an allyship model. Like, we’re in this together… as opposed to villainizing them from the outset” (Kristin). Kristin added: “I think it’s really important that we take this attitude, because some of our funders are in much better positions than we are in terms of institutionalizing sustainability into their own organizations… we could go and just pick their brain about, okay we want to make our conference more sustainable, are there lessons we can learn from them that we can migrate over?”
Finally, Pranjal Jain asked the SIGCHI community to think more broadly, and beyond SIGCHI. In chat, he suggested that the community consider partnering with other conferences to think through sustainability issues cooperatively. This connects back to the potential insights that might be gleaned from other Special Interest Groups within the ACM, such as SIGPLAN (see above). Bridget also highlighted parts of the world where there are venues that have signed up to certain sustainability principles, such as the Green Key initiative. Kashyap suggested that we could learn more about other event organizers like music festivals, giving an example from Finland.
4. Making Change at the Executive Level
There were many suggestions made along the lines of what SIGCHI might do at the executive level to effect change and improve the community’s (and its conferences’) environmental footprint. We discuss these below.
Akin to Accessibility: Chris described how elevating sustainability to the executive level could allow for someone to “kind of fight for the sustainability cause at a higher level because there are all these different trade-offs.” Cale noted agreement in chat that “issues of sustainability are inseparable from accessibility.” For example, executive policy could enable sustainability concerns to be included in site selection. Conference venues could be chosen that can help make the conference as environmentally friendly as possible. Currently sites are selected so far in advance that sustainability chairs are left out of the conversation, Adrian and Neha pointed out. Jennifer Mankoff noted that accessibility chairs also faced the same problem. Many people in chat supported the need for having these considerations brought in earlier to influence site selection.
One challenge to community level reforms is getting buy-in. Chris described how the dependence on buy-in limited the impact of sustainability chairs (also true for accessibility chairs, “you could replace the word sustainability with the word accessibility”), and instead, proposed “having someone at the EC level. In terms of writing sustainability principles into processes, into procedures… everyone should be aware of these. Everyone in the community should be pulling in the same direction… I think the route towards that is to come a much higher level down… so that it’s not up to a general chair. It’s not up to a sponsorship chair to have the choice whether they want to incorporate sustainability.”
Factoring Carbon Emissions into Costs: Kashyap suggested that every conference could aim to be 100% carbon-neutral, and Jen proposed putting a cap on carbon emissions allotted for conferences:
“Are we considering setting up concrete goals for reductions like a goal of a 50 or 90 percent reduction in emissions across our conferences? Have we thought about setting up a committee to assess that? Have we considered giving conferences a sustainability, like an emissions, budget that they have to balance in order to get their budgets approved for conferences? Or, that they can trade with other conferences if they want to have a year, that is, you know, more significant, and other conferences are willing to do less the way that carbon trading can happen?” — Jen Mankoff
Jen’s proposal to set up a framework for carbon trading was seconded by Adrian. He pointed out that “without a ceiling and some downward pressure we won’t see change. There are some fundamental questions here. You can halve the conference’s [environmental] impact by running it every other year. Or, sponsoring half as many conferences. Splitting [emissions] down at a per conference level may lead to inequities if not considered carefully.” Kristin explained that the current effort to measure the conferences’ carbon emissions was to take steps in this direction so that “concrete goals are achievable and not just idealistic.” She highlighted ACM’s current carbon offsetting policy but explained that, so far, SIGCHI conferences had adopted an opt-in model to accommodate researchers who could not charge offsets to their funding sources. This had not been very successful, and she recommended that SIGCHI offset conference carbon emissions by default. Neha highlighted that this approach is being adopted in the Gary Marsden Travel Awards, but current halts to travel have delayed them taking effect.
Luis Castro recommended making environmental concerns an explicit part of research papers and peer review: “We could make more visible, in our papers, some sort of a declaration of impact… [the] carbon footprint that our employer or company is contributing to, and annually. Just to make it more visible… I think that that would raise awareness among the community. I mean who are the companies who are contributing? Or, employers who are contributing more?…Just just to make it visible”. Cale and Kelly supported this suggestion, but Kelly recommended that SIGCHI should “set out a set of policies, or standards, around what methods and approaches — and data that we use in order to do these calculations.”
An emphasis on sustainability at the executive level could ensure that there is a budget for sustainable decision-making since “sustainability doesn’t really have a budget at all and so a lot of what we’ve been doing is going around and trying to save our conference’s money” (Kristin). Adrian and Kelly agreed that this point is a substantial problem: “Sustainability also has to be the cheaper option — back to the financial model, I’m afraid” (Adrian).
Setting an Example: Elina emphasized that industry could learn from the SIGCHI community, and that we could show that this needed shift is possible. Through our work and actions, the SIGCHI community could demonstrate that fulfilling, deep, and meaningful meetings can be had virtually (Elina). SIGCHI could also then develop additional opportunities for developing relationships that do not depend on conferences alone. Andy suggested that SIGCHI could consider “what other events are we organizing online, or hybrid, to enable early career researchers to develop their networks and socialize without flying?”
Conference organizing teams have previously worked with organizations to eliminate the memorabilia they traditionally provide at conferences and instead promote edible goods (e.g., at UIST–see Williams et al. 2021). Some roundtable attendees also emphasized that we should be “changing the industry that we’re part of” (Nic), so that we can promote sustainability beyond our conference community. This is especially important when changing our conference’s energy use is minuscule compared to the impacts of the wider industry.
Being Consistent: Another benefit to elevating sustainability concerns to the executive level would be ensuring consistent action to address SIGCHI’s environmental footprint. Right now, “There’s conferences that don’t have sustainability chairs. There’s conferences that one year they’ll have a chair, and one they won’t have a chair. So really this, this should be at [the] SIGCHI level… rather than having kind of a siloed conference fighting for, for individual conferences” (Chris). Adrian pointed out that this kind of inconsistency extends to the same conference from year to year, so there is no continuity. Kelly seconded that this was a big issue, and said that the next steps should be ensuring a sustainability role on the SIGCHI EC. She described how “the VP for Conferences and AC for Sustainability could be meeting with the various conference steering committees to communicate these priorities and commitments before key decisions are made.”
5. Introducing a SIGCHI Adjunct Chair (AC) for Sustainability
In line with Kelly’s suggestion above, we propose setting up an adjunct chair (AC) role that would prioritize these concerns and work with the SIGCHI Executive Committee and the SIGCHI community and conferences towards proposing and enacting changes needed. Based on the discussions at our roundtable, we outline the following role description for this SIGCHI AC for Sustainability (apply here, deadline August 27, 2021):
SIGCHI is committed to a sustainable HCI practice. The SIGCHI AC for Sustainability will be involved in working towards developing a strategic plan for “Making SIGCHI Sustainable”, with the support of a committee that they recruit. The role may involve consideration of data collection/measurement and carbon budget/evaluation mechanisms in relation to our conferences, whether they are in-person, virtual, co-located, geo-distributed, or hybrid, as well as other events and business meetings. It will very likely also entail building awareness across SIGCHI’s conferences and communities, through offering guidelines for conference organizing committees. Based on discussions outlined in this summary from our Equity Talks roundtable on sustainability, this AC will need to work with a number of other groups, (1) collaborating with other Executive Committee members focusing on conferences, accessibility, inclusion, and other priorities; (2) coordinating meetings with the various conference steering committees to communicate sustainability priorities and commitments before key decisions are made; (3) working with conference sustainability chairs to keep them up to date on SIG-level developments and possibly guide purchasing decisions; (4) collaborating with other SIGs; and (5) exploring engagement with ACM-level and industry initiatives for sustainability. The role will include managing a budget for various initiatives that the Sustainability committee chooses to undertake. This AC will work closely with the VP for Conferences.
The SIGCHI Executive Committee is grateful to the organizers for planning and leading this Equity Talk, and co-authoring this blog summary. We hope that this will lead to many more fruitful discussions around sustainability and SIGCHI.
