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Member-at-Large Positions:
SGB EC Vice-Chair for Operations - Presides over SGB and SGB EC Meetings, including SGB EC conference calls.
SGB EC Vice-Chair for SIG Development - Identify emerging technical areas, oversee transitional SIGs. The SGB Information Director, SGB committees, and SIG Liaisons to ACM Boards, other than those who are members of the SGB EC, will report through the VC Development.
SGB EC Secretary - Act as elections advisor, policy advisor, and financial and budgetary advisor.
Conference Advisor - Oversee issues related to conferences as directed by the SGB.
Large SIG Advisor - Act as liaison for large SIG issues.
Small SIG Advisor - Act as liaison for small SIG issues.
ACM Council Representative
SGB Council Representative - Act as liaison for SGB with ACM Council.
Cohoon reminded the SGB Leaders that they'd agreed to the Rights and Responsibilities during their last meeting so they need to follow them. They've got an ethical and fiduciary responsibility to publish newsletters on time. Missing issues are a major time sink. There is a constant barrage of librarians requesting missing issues. Questions generate interrupts to both ACM staff and volunteers. To ensure responsible behavior he proposed that a SIG two or more issues behind in it's publication schedule be automatically placed in transition. He suggested that this go into effect 3 months from the date. Members of the SGB were supportive of this suggestion.
Motion: Move that a SIG 2 or more issues behind in its publication schedule be automatically placed in transition. This policy would be placed in effect June 11, 2001
Cohoon, Cytron(22,2,3)
Snodgrass reviewed the requirements for an ACM conference manuscript system: robust, full-features, supported, working for small and large conferences, enhanced over time and very useful with a full-time person and remote hosting. One possibility for this would be to use CMT.
Motion: The SGB requests that the EC choose a conference manuscript tracking tool, arrange access, support and enhancement, and develop a business plan, within the next three month.
Snodgrass, Hayne
(23,0,2)
Snodgrass discussed the publications rights and responsibilities policy which was approved by the SGB last October and the Publications Board last November. The policy enumerates rights that ACM guarantees to readers, authors, reviewers, editors and program chairs.
Editors and Program chairs can expect ACM to:
Provide a clerical and software infrastructure that supports tracking submissions and computing system administration for journals, transactions, magazines, newsletters and proceedings.
Motion: The SGB requests that the SGB EC review the rights and responsibilities policy and bring to the fall 2001 SGB meeting a list of those rights that are not currently being guaranteed along with proposals for how to ensure those rights.
Snodgrass, Wiehl
(25,0,0)
The SGB EC considered the serious issues related to security and auditing. They realized that many ACM members are concerned about online voting. Notkin reported that the SGB EC agreed that utilizing an outside firm was most appropriate. The cost would be approximately $75K. Normally the election costs $25K excluding postage. The SGB EC suggested that 2-3 of the larger SIGs do a trial run.
Notkin reported that the SGB EC supported any SIGs that wished to utilize an outside firm to run an electronic election. Those leaders with interest were asked to contact Pat Ryan at ACM headquarters.
There is good and bad news. The bad news is the falling member participation including students. The good news is the financial reserve and stable or growing event participation but where do we go next?
ACM needs to map membership benefits to individuals. We need to define motivations and utilize that information to restructure the organization for the long term.
A discussion during the November MAB meeting identified a number of potential new directions:
The MAB has a critical issue initiative underway regarding membership and subscriptions. There are several timescales here. In the short term what can we can do better with the current services/benefits to target marketing. In the medium term we can survey members to look for new initiatives and in the long term is there a better ACM to work to?
Further work is required by the Boards. Background research will be needed regarding costing for benefits changes, discussion with other interested parties (EC, council, Chapters), additional information requirements (graduation day for students) and additional office procedures like membership cards.
Action: Baglio to place discussion of students and transitioning on August SGB agenda and invite Israel to participate.
Broader View of Who is an ACM member
Group Facilitator: Ron Cytron
View: Those who create assets as well as those who use assets of ACM and its SIGs are essentially members of the ACM community, and should be recognized as such.
Unbundling: Instead of offering an ACM membership as a package of the same service and cost for all people, define an ACM membership to be essentially zero-cost and zero-service. The burden is then on ACM and SIGs to craft packages that are attractive to the members.
Thoughts:
Community
Group Facilitator: Stuart Feldman
One of the main reasons for joining a group, e.g. an ACM SIG, is to be part of a community. (Not trivially circular assertion.) Some aspects are
Another problem is that there are perverse financial disincentives: many employers pay conference fees but not memberships, so the individual ends up subsidizing the employer.
There are multiple, overlapping but not nested, communities, e.g.
It is useful to distinguish roles of a SIG, as a service organization (guarantor of continuity in conference quality and effectiveness) and as a community.
Business Models:
Group Facilitator: Stephen Hayne
Anytime someone new "touches" ACM and SIGs (i.e. conferences, DL, etc.) we should give them a membership, or perhaps what is known as "registration". This would help us track some of their demographic info and data mine their interests for potential SIG involvement. Is an intro/hook for different layers of ACM/SIG membership, i.e. ACM lite, or SIG only.
Allow joining SIG as an ACM member but with no ACM services (SIG only). Register as above and encourage joining ACM with menu of services.
Create alliances with other services that give significant (!) discounts to ACM members. An example was the insurance IEEE members have access to.
Price the DL more aggressively (i.e. archival pricing, tiered access) and profit share more deeply with the SIGs. Data mine to discover if the DL as well as institutional adoption is at the root of the decline of perceived SIG value.
A couple of these seem to overlap nicely with other comments.
Super SIGS
Group Facilitator: Alain Chesnais
Action Item: Set up a forum for SIGs challenges by new allocation to identify common areas of interest
She indicated that not allowing SIGs to give lower prices to their own members than to any other ACM member actively discourages SIG membership. While still wanting to encourage ACM membership, this scheme further encourages SIG membership. The following bylaw change was suggested:
Fee for ACM+SIG member <= fee for SIG-only member <= fee for ACM-only member <= nonmember fee
Brown suggested that this algorithm applied to all SIG products and events. Some members of the SGB felt that ACM having the discount was important. ACM is providing a lot in background. Cohoon responded that this was a very low-level view. Wiehl suggested that the fee structure have no explicit ordering between SIG only and ACM only members.
Fee for ACM+SIG member <= fee for ACM only member <= non member-and-ACM+SIG member <= fee for SIG only member <= non member, with no explicit ordering between SIG only and ACM only members.
Motion: Move to amend Bylaw 6, Section 6 as follows:
Fee for ACM+SIG member <= fee for ACM only member <= non member,
and fee for ACM+SIG member <= fee for SIG only member <= non member,
with no explicit ordering between SIG only and ACM only members.
Weihl, Sethi(21,2,3)
Action: Chesnais to bring SGB request for change to bylaw 6 section 6 regarding fees to ACM EC.
The intent is to work with SIGs, build on what is already being done, produce a digitized version of tutorials plus added value. ACM will try to utilize more than one company and consider tutorials from conferences and special sessions. These would be advanced specialist course; medium level courses with a possible general demand and lower level courses that will be of interest to a wider audience. They intend to experiment with on line query processing, introduction to HCI and Java for high school teachers.
Davies reviewed offerings from other organizations involved with this type of program including American Institute of Chemical Engineers, IEEE, ASME and SAE. E suggested that ACM create a committee to take responsibility to approve courses and make them available nationally.
Major issues to be discussed are the initial funding of the experiment, pricing policy, royalties, copyright issues, marketing, distribution and evaluation. SIG leaders were asked to provide input to Davies via e-mail.
During these three years, SIGCPR would agree to:
Niederman explained that SIGCPR is one of, if not the oldest special interest group in ACM. It has an historic and unique role within the organization. It is the only group that targets the nature of computer-related work and workers -- a key ingredient in socio-technical systems.
SIGCPR over the past decade has conducted annual conferences that have generated an operating profit while providing for the SIG allocations of those years. These conferences have developed a small but very loyal following.
It is clear that with the current minimum allocation of $15,000, SIGCPR will be completely bankrupt within 10 years (probably more like 4 years). Rather than wait for this eventuality, it is preferable for all concerned to act now to create a stable future organization.
As the approximate amount paid in most years, $3000 is a reasonable temporary allocation for the group while other options are explored.
It is reasonable to expect SIGCPR to consider means of expansion. Workforce issues are clearly highly publicized and in the forefront of policy decisions. This is, however, an area of much controversy at times. Interest groups such as ITAA seem to be very successful at providing conferences targeted to application of anecdotal knowledge but there seems to be much less interest in developing new knowledge among practitioners and computer scientists in this area. Nevertheless, there are often opportunities available when the right approach is taken.
It is reasonable to consider potential merger with another SIG group. Several groups would seem to have a potential common interest including SIGMIS, SIGGROUP, and SIGWEB. A three-year time frame should suffice for carrying out these discussions.
It is also reasonable to consider that the shift in emphasis among SIG groups may mean that there just is no place for SIGCPR as currently constituted. Rather than drain resources from other SIG programs, it may be possible to effect a win-win change of affiliation to another society constituted differently and with different aims to everyone's benefit.
Finally, it may be that providing a singular exception to SIGCPR -- particularly in light of 1) that personnel issues cuts across the interests of almost all the SIGS. But we are the only ones who specifically focus on it. Thus we make it our business to look at something which is in danger of being "everyone's business so it is no one's business" and 2) its long history with ACM -- from the minimum allocation would provide continued existence of the program without unduly burdening the overall SIG program. This is a matter for the SIG chairs to decide, of course, but may be aided by observation of the effects of the new allocation system overall.
Motion: Move to propose that SIGCPR's allocation be frozen at $3,000 for the next 3 years.
(Niederman, Cohoon)
Motion tabled until next SGB meeting
Several leaders voiced concern regarding the new allocation method. Those SGB leaders were reminded that the allocation review, recommendations and final decision was made by their fellow SIG Chairs during the October'00 meeting. All of the back-up for that meeting along with the resulting minutes are posted on the web-site. All SIG Chairs were encouraged to review those documents.
Action: Baglio to place following motion on SGB agenda for August: Move to propose that SIGCPR's allocation be frozen at $3,000 for the next 3 years.
(Niederman, Cohoon)
Motion tabled until next SGB meeting
Glinert reported that ASSET'00 was a big success, and appears to have come out in the black, although the books are not yet closed. They had a total of 90 registrants, which was a 50% increase over ASSETS'98. Planning for ASSETS'02 is underway. The event will be held in Edinburgh and Chaired by Vicki Hanson of IBM TJ Watson Research Center. The Program chair is Julie Jacko from Georgia Tech. ACM HQ is currently in negotiation with the SIG and conference leaders hotel of choice.
SIGCAPH has submitted a full slate for the spring election. SIGCAPH has decided to increase their dues slightly in FY'02 to better reflect the current actual cost of services provided and to prevent future erosion of their fund balance.
Motion: Move to continue SIGCAPH in its current status as a full-service SIG for the next 4 years.
Berenbaum, Cytron
unanimous
The SIG co-sponsors a 5-7 day annual conference, which includes tutorials, workshops, posters, a doctoral program and demos. The paper acceptance rate for this conference is less than 20%. Best Paper Awards are distributed. The co-sponsorship breaks down as follows: 75% SIGMM, 15% SIGGRAPH and 10% SIGCOMM. Attendance averages about 250 people. The last few conferences have helped the fund balance grow to $97,000.
SIGMM also cooperates with several conferences including SPIE/IS&T MMCN, IDMS and NOSSDAV.
ACM publishes the ACM Multimedia Systems Journal, a joint publication with Springer/Verlag.
SIGMM is facing some challenges. There is competition for conference attendees as every conference includes multimedia topics and IEEE is making efforts to establish a conference. Membership numbers are on the decline but the bigger problem is the core members. The SIG leaders are developing their volunteer structure for the future.
Motion: Move to continue SIGMM's current status as a conference SGI for the next 4 years.
(Cohoon, Ebcioglu)
Unanimous
The mission of SIGOPS is to provide a forum for people working on a broad spectrum of issues in operating systems research and development. "Operating systems" has always been construed extremely broadly; "systems" would in many ways be more appropriate, except they tend not to cover low-level hardware systems.
The primary activities of the SIG involve running conferences and workshops and publishing proceedings. SOSP is their flagship conference; it and OSDI (which SIGOPS cosponsors with USENIX) are widely recognized as the two premier conferences in the systems area.
The primary educational activity is to provide scholarships to help students attend SIGOPS conferences, particularly SOSP. The leaders have devoted significant SIGOPS funds to this for the last several SOSPs and have also raised money from other sources (mostly industry).
For a number of years, the SOSP proceedings have been published on CD-ROM as well as in paper form. In recent years, they've included recent years' proceedings on the CD-ROM as well as the current conference. In future years, they'd like to expand this, perhaps including recent European Workshop proceedings as well.
In community-building activities, they have recently:
Self assessment
Overall, SIGOPS provides a great service to members and to the larger community of systems researchers and developers. They run the premier conferences and workshops in the field. At the same time, as discussed in the next section on challenges, their membership continues to decline. It is not clear what the right model is for continued existence.
Challenges
There are two challenges facing SIGOPS: fragmentation of the field and declining membership.
Fragmentation seems like a natural progression of a field as it matures. SIGOPS has the advantage of breadth, which allows is to evolve and to embrace new areas (e.g., the web). At the same time, specialized groups tend to splinter off from SIGOPS. This has the potential to marginalize SIGOPS. So far this hasn't happened in a significant way, but there are signs of it in some areas (e.g., in some areas the papers that are submitted to SOSP tend to be the ones that couldn't get into the primary venue for that area). It may be better to let the mature areas splinter off while SIGOPS continues to move ahead with new areas, but there is the potential for a problem here that requires some attention to avoid.
Declining membership is a serious problem. The community of people who attend SOSP, the European Workshop, OSDI, and our other meetings is large and active. But many of those people are not SIGOPS members. The community served is much larger than the membership. By itself, this is not necessarily a problem, and in fact is probably typical of most such organizations. But the decline in membership is an ongoing problem that must either be reversed or must be addressed with a fundamental shift in our model of how they operate and why they exist.
The time is fast approaching for a serious discussion of our raison d'etre. Ten or twenty years ago, people joined SIGOPS because it gave them access to publications - both the newsletter and conference proceedings. In the last ten years, information has been disseminated via the Internet far faster and earlier than we could do it. As a result, fewer people join SIGOPS for the publications. Some may join because they get a discount on conference registrations; some may join because they still like getting a paper copy of conference proceedings; some may join because they like supporting what the SIG does. But joining is no longer necessary for people working in the field.
One possibility is to continue in the current mode. Membership will probably continue to decline, but financially this need not be a huge concern. Conferences tend to break even or make a small amount of money. In addition, they have a large fund balance. So they can continue to fund various initiatives, provide student scholarships, and so on. If they do this and membership continues to decline, we will eventually evolve into a community service organization. Another option is to aggressively recruit new members and to develop new offerings or enhancements to existing offerings to increase the value of being a member. Whether this will reverse the trend of declining membership, or merely slow it, is hard to predict.
Motion: Move to continue SIGOPS in its current status as a full-service SIG for the next 4 years.
Cohoon, Berenbaum
unanimous
SIGSAC sponsors several conferences annually include the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), ACM Symposium on Access control Models and Technologies (SACMAT), and the ACM New Security Paradigms Workshop.
The CCS, founded in 1993 is held each November and is considered their flagship event. The conference has a broad scope includes tutorials and workshops and has been held throughout the world. The SIGSAC conferences feed into ACM's Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC). Several TISSEC editors have served as Program chairs for SIGSAC conferences.
Sandhu summarized that SIGSAC is in pretty good shape, they have a strong foundation on which to build for the next 4 years. They intend to strengthen their existing conferences (as opposed to starting new ones) and are considering new initiatives including professional education and awards.
Motion: Move to continue SIGSAC in its current status as a conference SIG for the next 4 years.
Cohoon, Wiehl
Unanimous
The latest issue of the bulletin was June 2000. Corless believes they can catch up before the June deadline to place them in transition for being behind by 3 issues.
The annual conference is called ISSAC and was held in Scotland in 2000. In 2001 it will be held in London. They had a 25% increase in paper submissions over 1999 in Vancouver. 2002 will be held in Lille, France.
The financial picture is healthy for the short term. As many of the SIGs are seeing they are experiencing a decline in membership but this has slowed over the last year.
Their new initiatives include two special-purpose mailing lists started by Chris Brown and Emil Volcheck. The leaders plan to include MathMA actively in SIGSAM and will put together a Scientific Advisory Panel for the SIGNUM legacy award by the end of April. They have approved travel awards for students for ISSAC 2001. An electronic bulletin prototype can be found at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~mwg/sigsam/Bulletin.html.
SIGSAM leaders will:
Review: Computer Algebra is broader and less cohesive than it was a victim of its success. Focus and filtering are the values a SIG gives.
Recruit: Personal contact, don't drop the ball: student and conference memberships.
Revitalize: New plans, MathML/XML, new generations of technology, new centre: The Ontario Research Centre for computer Algebra.
Motion: Move to continue SIGSAM's current status as a multi-service SIG for the next 4 years.
(Cohoon, Feldman)
Unanimous
Volunteers outside of North America help SIGSOFT's international efforts. The FSE conference is co-sponsored every other year with the European Software Engineering Conference. SIGSOFT co-sponsors the International conference on Software Engineering, which alternates years inside and outside North America. The current and past EIC of TOSEM are Europeans.
SIGSOFT issues Outstanding Research and a Distinguished Service Awards each year. They have developed a student travel award program.
The SIGSOFT leadership has worked hard at managing the proliferation of software engineering conferences and workshops. They anticipate more collocation and a joint FSE.ESEC conference. They actively encourage the merging of overlapping workshops, which is necessary to allow for new events in emerging areas.
SIGSOFT is still losing members at a scary past. They do not have a good story about the interaction of the research and practitioner communities in software engineering. As Notkin told ACM Council in their showcase two ears ago, he believes SIGSOFT is a microcosm of ACM in this dimension. This has led to his personal interest in alternative membership models for SIGs.
SIGSOFT has been active in the issues surrounding software engineering as a profession. This is extremely complicated, political controversial an important. The leaders have helped craft ACM's policy that "licensing is premature and ineffective at this time".
Motion: Move to continue SIGSOFT's current status as a multi-service SIG for the next 4 years.
(Cohoon, Berenbaum)
Unanimous
Motion: Move to continue SIGSOUND's current status as an electronic-only SIG for the next 4 years.
Cohoon, Harramundanis
Unanimous
Klein reported that the SGB EC endorsed the dissolution of SIGBIO, handling membership obligations, reverting the fund balance to the SGB and earmarking it for a 2-year period for BIO related activities. With no objection from the SGB, this decision will be brought to Council for final dissolution. There was no objection from the SGB.
The SGB EC thanked the leadership of SIGBIO for their efforts in revitalization.
With the support of the SIGUCCS Chair, the SGB EC suggested that the SGB place SIGUCCS in transition and request a revitalization plan by May 1st.
Motion: Move to accept the SGB EC's recommendation to place SIGUCCS in transition and request a revitalization plan for May 1st.
Cohoon, Cytron
Unanimous
Motion: Move to cap SGB weighted votes at 5.
Cohoon Glinert
The SGB believed that they were too close to the end of the meeting to make such an important decision.
Motion: Move to table motion regarding SGB weighted votes being capped at 5.
Cytron, Hayne
(16,5,3)
Action: Baglio to place weighted voting on August agenda.
The meeting was adjourned at 5:00 pm.
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