SIGCHI ANNUAL REPORT

July 1994 - June 1995
Submitted by: James R. Miller

SIGCHI, the ACM special interest group for human-computer interaction, concludes this review period with 5,506 members (May 1995), a slight decline from two years ago. Our conferences and publications remain successful. Our finances have suffered from some uncertainty, but we have defined a plan with ACM Headquarters that will restore our fund balance to more appropriate levels in the next two years. Meanwhile, we have begun a number of new programs, which will address the technical and professional needs of our members.

1. Publications initiatives and notable papers published in the newsletter or proceedings; and any electronic publishing initiatives.

The SIGCHI Bulletin has continued to publish four issues of about 100 pages per issue. The publications we began in partnership with ACM continue to develop. Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) has published its first round of issues, and subscriptions to interactions are running notably above plan. Almost 50% of SIGCHI members subscribe to the "CHI Plus" membership plan that provides them with three conference proceedings per year.

SIGCHI has also become heavily involved in electronic publishing and information dissemination in the last year. We have launched our home page on acm.org (http://info.sigchi.acm.org/sigchi/). The CHI'95 proceedings were released in CD-ROM form in addition to their standard print version, and are also now available on the Internet (http://www. acm.org/sigchi/chi95 /Electronic /chi95cd.htm) on an experimental basis. We are also about to begin an experiment with electronic publishing of the SIGCHI Bulletin, which will make use of the new ACM membership validation server. Thanks are due to the ACM Publications Board for their help in these experiments.

Not surprisingly, our work in this area is raising issues we need to consider. We are facing the same question about the role of the Internet as are most publishing organizations: What do we sell? What do we give away? How can we use this technology to build a stronger and more valuable organization? We hope that the experiments we're carrying out in this area will yield the information that we and ACM will need to make good decisions. At the same time, the expansion of our conference and publishing activities is stressing the ability of the CHI Plus program to meet the needs of our membership. We are considering whether some alternative plan, such as an a la carte system, might be more appropriate.

2. Special projects which had some sort of impact on the technical community, including any standards activities.

Our publishing and conference activities are of course designed to impact the technical community, and the continued health of those programs suggests that we're being successful in doing so. In addition, through the efforts of our adjunct chair for Standards and other members, SIGCHI is active in various HCI standards activities, such as the ANSI/HFES HCI Standards Committee, ISO TC159/SC4, ISO C159/SC4/WG5, and IFIP TC13.

3. Conference/workshop program highlights.

We have had a full set of conferences in the last year. Our flagship CHI conference was held in Denver this year, and we additionally sponsored or co-sponsored CSCW'94, the 1995 East-West HCI conference in Moscow, Multimedia'94, Society and the Future of Computers, and UIST'94. We are also actively planning CHI'96 and CHI'97, DIS'95, ICAT+VRST'95, Multimedia'95, UIST'95, and UIST'96.

4. Awards given out.

At CHI '95, Austin Henderson was awarded the SIGCHI Distinguished Service Award, in recognition of his many years of service to SIGCHI and ACM.

5. Educational activities or initiatives.

We have continued the Doctoral Consortium as part of the CHI conference. We have also explored (but not yet implemented) a "tutorials to go" program, which would present popular CHI tutorials at various locations and times other than the CHI conference.

6. International initiatives.

We have continued to develop the participation of the international SIGCHI community. CHI'96 will be in Vancouver, and we have sponsored and co-sponsored conferences in a variety of non-North American locations around the world, including Moscow and Singapore. We are still reviewing our experience with having held INTERCHI'93 in Amsterdam, and will be using that experience to make decisions about the location of future CHI conferences.

On other fronts, we hope that our increased use of the Internet will make the physical location of our membership less relevant than it once was. We also made a special attempt to include European and Asian members in the recent election of the Executive Committee.

7. Collaborative efforts with other SIGs or sister societies.

We are actively collaborating with other SIGS on conferences, as noted earlier. Since the earliest days of SIGCHI, we have worked closely with SIGGRAPH on the production of CHI conference videos as part of the SIGGRAPH Video Review. We are now in the process of redefining that relationship, since SIGCHI is now clearly a stable enough organization to take on the management of that task.

An issue we, along with other SIGs, are currently facing is the nature of multi-SIG co-sponsorship relationships. Many important conferences cut broadly across ACM's domain, and can touch on the interests of many SIGs. Having a large number of SIGs involved in the management of such conferences is valuable, but it brings with it the risk that the oversight of the conference will become defocused across all the participating SIGs. We have not yet found the right balance to this dilemma, and it is important that we do so.

8. Membership activities and/or concerns in the next 1 - 3 years, including leadership development.

Our membership is reasonably stable; we have seen some attrition (about 5%) over the past few years, but much less than what ACM as a whole has seen. Meanwhile, we are working with Headquarters to pursue our lapsed members, and to carry out other membership recruiting activities. A simple single-sheet membership brochure has been very helpful as part of this. We are also very interested in whether we can use the presence of many of our publications on the World-Wide Web as a marketing and recruiting tool.

As with most SIGs, leadership development continues to be a challenge for us: being active in SIG leadership can be a lot of work, and our members are getting less support from their employers for this sort of volunteerism. This problem simply requires more of our attention; towards this end, we're creating an adjunct chair for volunteers to focus on this problem.

A pragmatic aspect of this issue is whether the SIG election process should be more open to running unopposed candidates. Having a real contest is clearly the ideal situation, but, in our past two elections, we have sometimes found ourselves with only one candidate willing to run. It's of course wrong to put up obviously bogus candidates, who have no real intention to serve, simply to fill out the slate. We're pleased that ACM has been willing to work with us to permit single candidates to run in these situations, but the current way of doing so does not fit well into the ACM election process. We recommend that ACM address this issue seriously in the near future.

9. Listing of computer and other equipment purchases.

Most of our equipment needs have been satisfied by recycling our existing equipment through new committees. (There is of course a problem waiting to happen here, when this aging equipment begins to break down!) Meanwhile, we did purchase a new PC to aid in the production of the SIGCHI Bulletin, and we bought a scanner to help with the development of the HCI Bibliography.

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