SIGCHI in 2022
The SIGCHI Executive Committee wishes you a wonderful and invigorating 2023! This post showcases the numerous efforts of our volunteers towards co-creating and co-nurturing positive change within SIGCHI in 2022, hinting also at what’s in the works for 2023.
TL;DR: We spent 2022 appreciating our volunteers, engaging our community, sharing knowledge across our conferences, expanding our global (and local) presence, supporting our members, recognizing our achievements, turning 40, looking to the future, and doing the work! Read about it all below.
Appreciating Our Volunteers
We cannot thank enough all those who serve on the Executive Committee (EC) for their dedication to serving and positively impacting SIGCHI. These volunteers spend thousands of volunteer hours, year after year, towards ensuring that SIGCHI remains strong and continues to grow.
In 2022, we said goodbye to Shaowen Bardzell (former Executive Vice-President or VP), Tamara L. Clegg (former VP for Communications and Membership), Josh Andres (former Adjunct Chair or AC for Awards), and Priya Kumar (former AC for Volunteer Support), and are deeply grateful for the time they spent with us! Roles on the EC were reconfigured in response, with Andrew Kun now serving as Executive VP and coordinating Awards, Luigi De Russis overseeing Finance, and Simone Kriglstein in charge of Communications. We saw a change in our project management team, as we bid farewell to Kristi Audette and onboarded Jillian Skelly, Morgan Vick, and Jill Skuba.
We made two significant changes to the SIGCHI Bylaws to introduce the VP for Accessibility role and convert the VP Comms and Membership role into two — VP Comms and VP Membership. Naomi Yamashita has transitioned from her VP at Large role to VP Membership, and we are conducting an open call for a VP for Accessibility and VP at Large (deadline February 15), sadly bidding farewell to Stacy Branham, our Adjunct Chair for Accessibility of 2.5 years. In January 2023, we also closed our open calls for Adjunct Chairs in a number of areas, and are in the process of confirming new EC members.
The year also saw an expansion in the EC’s focus — we added on a number of new/updated committees and working groups (now 25 and counting!), aiming for a volunteer infrastructure that supports the organization’s growth and renewal. This includes new committees for sustainability, partnership, equity, publications, chapters, hybridity, global, and many more (see our full list).
All of our committees recruit via open calls, following policy guidance from the previous EC. We also have a permanently open call for volunteers, and encourage you to fill this out if you would like to volunteer for any of the EC’s committees.
Engaging Our Community
The Equity Talks series in 2021 created for the EC a new ritual of facilitating conversations with community members via Zoom sessions, targeting various topics of interest and importance for the global SIGCHI membership. In 2022, we continued our efforts to engage in open community dialogue and governance through our organization of Open Sessions and Open EC Meetings. Most open sessions are scheduled to accommodate different time zones, as are our meetings. For both, we have been sharing recordings on the SIGCHI YouTube channel, also including written meeting notes and write-ups, as they become available.
We organized open sessions on SIGCHI awards to present updates to the awards process and best practices for putting together nominations. We discussed mentorship; our conversations were captured in an Interactions article on Mentoring Across SIGCHI. Our open session on Structuring Solidarity was focused on supporting members of our community who are impacted by the war in Ukraine. We came together to reimagine SIGCHI futures. We also had open sessions on volunteering for SIGCHI — led by Priya Kumar — and invited Geraldine Fitzpatrick to talk to us about service and leadership. Our next open session is on safety at conferences this week, to be led by Cale Passmore, our Equity Chair.
Our open EC meetings also take place on a semi-regular basis, as and when we have updates to share with our members, and inputs/feedback to solicit. All meeting recordings are on our website. Join us at our next meeting, which will take place on February 23, 2023!
Sharing Knowledge Across Our Conferences
In addition to engaging our community, Susanne Boll (VP Conferences) and Simone Kriglstein (then AC for Knowledge Sharing) co-organized virtual sessions to facilitate knowledge-sharing among our Conferences’ Steering Committee Chairs (CSCC) and General Chairs, who courageously navigated the ever-changing landscape of conference organization in 2022. These sessions aimed to allow for mutual learning across conference leaders, generate a repository of resources that conferences can turn to re: e.g., hybrid event needs, and ensure that relevant decision-making activities involve these leaders’ voices. To continue these conversations asynchronously, we have set up a Slack workspace for easier communication across conferences and SIG leadership. If you are not on this yet but believe you should be, as a conference leader, write to me and let me know.
With 26 (and counting) SIGCHI-sponsored conferences, having added on ACM COMPASS and ACM CUI in 2022, many EC members and committees are available to offer guidance to our conferences, so please reach out if you are in need of help or orientation! Kash Todi, our VP Operations, works with our developer team to continually introduce new features into our Programs app that is used by all SIGCHI (and other) conferences. The Publications committee led by VP Publications Pejman Mirza-Babei and Vice-Chair Sven Mayer oversees many different aspects of our pubs workflows, and aims to augment support to community members and conferences on related matters. Adriana Vivacqua, VP at Large, and Susanne Boll are co-leading the Hybrid Working Group, with the goal of providing guidance to our conferences on hybrid formats. Our current leads for Finance and Community Support — Luigi De Russis, Accessibility — Stacy Branham, Equity — Cale Passmore, and Sustainability — Nic Bidwell are also available to provide guidance as needed. A Data Working Group is currently being set up by our Past President Helena Mentis to offer guidance on collecting and working with data in SIGCHI capacities, among other tasks.
Expanding Our Global (and Local) Presence
Foregrounding SIGCHI chapters and communities regionally and globally, including across the Global South, has been a dedicated focus on this EC. Matt Jones — our VP Chapters with the Chapters Committee that he leads — has been engaging SIGCHI chapters in conversations over the Chapters Slack workspace, monthly calls for distinct time zones, chapter engagement projects, and much more. If you are a chapter representative but yet to access these conversations, write to me so I can connect you.
Regional committees such as our Asia and Latin America committees — led by Naomi Yamashita and Adriana Vivacqua respectively — are actively focusing on SIGCHI matters particular to these regions. In 2022, we approved the Mediterranean-CHI committee, currently led by Maristella Matera, to foster connections across this region as well, and it is actively recruiting! The Global Committee, also led by Adriana Vivacqua, is comprised of volunteers committed to knowledge sharing across chapters and regions.
In addition to supporting its committees, the EC aims to organize events, co-located with our quarterly hybrid EC meetings, in locations where the SIGCHI community is still young. In December, for example, we sponsored a tremendously successful research symposium in Mumbai, India, for HCI & Friends that was co-chaired by Anupriya Tuli and Akhil Mathur, and hosted by Anirudha Joshi at IIT Bombay.
Supporting Our Members
Our community support mechanisms, which can be accessed via Submittable, are back to funding physical travel after the pause imposed by the pandemic. In 2022, the Gary Marsden Travel Awards were availed by 145 individuals towards conference travel and registration (approx. USD 265K). The SIGCHI Development Fund supported 27 projects (approx. USD 190K), of which 12 were conferences’ initiatives and 6 were chapters’ initiatives. These programs are updated regularly, as new community needs surface. For example, the EC recently approved the provision of carer grants along with the GMTA, and depending on the need, an additional ticket is now reimbursable under companion support. We thank Luigi De Russis for coordinating the programs as well as the disbursal of these funds. This is the closest that SIGCHI has come to meeting its financial target for community support (as per our budget).
In addition to being eligible to receive a Gary Marsden Travel Award or a SIGCHI Development Fund grant, SIGCHI membership offers several additional benefits. In new benefits, members now have access to a @sigchi.org email alias, and can set up forwarding on their myacm.acm.org page. With this @sigchi.org alias, members can now also access a Grammarly premium subscription at no cost (more on this soon!). Members also have access to SIGCHI-relevant journals such as TOCHI, COMPASS, IMWUT, and others. We are grateful for the efforts of Naomi Yamashita for systematically reviewing existing membership benefits and persevering to introduce new ones.
Early in 2022, we lowered membership fees for students and professionals to approximately half of what they were before; standard rates are now USD 30 for professionals and USD 10 for students, and there are reduced rates for many countries. In addition, we are working with ACM to grant all ACM members new to SIGCHI the option to sign up for complimentary SIGCHI membership when they register for a SIGCHI conference in 2023.
Recognizing Our Achievements
Every year, SIGCHI awards recognize excellence in our members, honoring outstanding dissertations, societal impact, and lifetime achievements in research, practice, and service, and growing the SIGCHI Academy. In 2022, we updated our awards processes, after surveying community members for feedback on our awards. We organized open calls to identify new members of the Awards Committee, which resulted in the appointment of Philippe Palanque and Sunny Consolvo as chairs of the Service and (the newly formed) Practice subcommittees, respectively. Later in the year, we appointed Yvonne Rogers as chair of the Research subcommittee, and Leysia Palen and Niklas Elmqvist neared the completion of their terms as chairs of the Societal Impact and Outstanding Dissertation subcommittees. We thank Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and Patrick Baudisch for their service as Awards Committee co-chairs, and other committee members who completed their terms as well. We also made efforts to solicit more nominations and increase diversity among awardees, making changes towards greater transparency and accountability overall.
Being — as we are — an organization that runs on service, we recently introduced the Recognizing SIGCHI Service program to honor those who give us their service at the community, chapter, and/or conference level(s), though they may not yet be eligible for the lifetime award. Please consider nominating someone you know for this recognition, anytime through the year. We will periodically call for nominations as well.
Turning 40!
SIGCHI completed 40 years in 2022, giving us an excuse to celebrate our past and present, and imagine new goals and priorities for our future. We celebrated this anniversary at CHI 2022 with SIGCHI 40 T-shirts, floats, and photo ops. We sponsored a volunteer appreciation event, which we co-organized with the CHI organizing team. We held multiple Special Interest Groups. We also hosted a plenary panel on SIGCHI’s Celebrations and Aspirations, which was led by Andrew Kun. This panel was documented in the Interactions special issue that Susan Dray (Partnerships Chair) and I put together with the help of many other contributors. Other articles include a 33-author chronology of SIGCHI’s current (26) conferences from 1983 to 2022, a historic analysis of SIGCHI’s identity as a global organization, and engaging accounts of the value SIGCHI brought to their lives and careers. More on this issue here. In other SIGCHI-40 updates, we introduced the Futuring SIGCHI Committee (led by Naveena Karusala), comprised of students and early career professionals, for sandboxing new ideas and imagining new directions for SIGCHI.
Looking to the Future
So what’s next? With our committees set up, and members settled into their roles, our highest priority now is to pass on a thriving organization to the future community leaders of SIGCHI. Programs introduced recently are being tweaked and stabilized, processes and workflows are being documented, and changes are being recorded so that interested members and leaders of our community can look up past decisions and deliberations as they consider new ones. These changes will find their way into an improved online information repository, in the form of a redesigned SIGCHI website that links to wikis and announces regular updates.
Towards ensuring that, when SIGCHI turns 50, we have a rich repository of resources capturing changes and updates from now until 2032, we plan to introduce the SIGCHI Quarterly, a collection of short announcements and longer blog posts, that will be available on the ACM DL and accessible to SIGCHI Members at no extra cost. We will invite interested volunteer leaders of our community to take on guest editorship of each issue.
Continuing our approach from 2022, we will be organizing onsite and online events to engage global and local audiences, at CHI and our other meetings through the year. Like 2022, CHI 2023 will find us organizing a welcome reception, awards celebration, chapters breakfast, SIGCHI+CHI town hall, and more. The EC will also be meeting at ACM COMPASS 2023 in South Africa for what is currently being planned as a leadership summit, to continue engaging local and regional HCI communities.
We will continue to invest in volunteer development efforts that ensure agility within our organizational structures. For this, we must continue to make visible our diverse volunteering pathways, focus on the wellbeing of our existing volunteer base, prepare as many of these volunteers to take on more engaged roles as possible, and enable mentoring opportunities for our senior volunteers to support new people in new and old roles.
Speaking of which, elections are coming! Helena Mentis will be taking on the work of creating a nomination committee, identifying criteria for candidates, soliciting interest and participation, and handing over the information to ACM, which will then run the election in Spring 2024. Right now, our goal is to expose many new members to the workings of the EC, so they are encouraged to run for election. See our bylaws for more information, as well as our prior Past President Loren Terveen’s posts on elections in 2021.
Doing the Work!
There is so much that happens on a daily—sometimes hourly — basis across SIGCHI that no doubt this list here is woefully incomplete. There is also the invisible labor that not only our EC members, but all our volunteers, contribute endlessly to keep SIGCHI running. So if you are a SIGCHI volunteer, please do remember that we appreciate you and are always, always grateful for the time and energy you give us. And if you see a SIGCHI volunteer, do please thank them for all they do to keep us going!
For 2023, we invite you to become a SIGCHI member (if you are not one already) and partake of the year’s journey with us. Subscribe to the SIGCHI-Members list, attend our open meetings/sessions, volunteer on our committees, contribute in ways that resonate with you, and reach out, connect, engage whenever you are able — we are here to serve you as best we can!
In service,
Neha Kumar
SIGCHI President
