SIGWEB Viability Report - August 2005

Peter J. Nürnberg

Chair, SIGWEB

background

  • founded c. 15 years ago as SIGLINK
  • changed name to SIGWEB in 1998
  • members from different fields
    (computer science, literary studies, library studies)
  • members from different professions
    (academics, professionals, writers)
  • common member themes:
    • Doug Englebart's vision of augmenting the human intellect
    • Vannevar Bush's vision of building tools that fit the way people think

fora

  • HT: Hypertext Conference
  • JCDL: Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
  • DocEng: Symposium on Document Engineering
  • ICSOC: International Conference on Service Oriented Computing

up-to-now

  • membership:
    • significant slippage through June 2004
    • stabilized recently
    • reflects dropping conference attendance
  • money:
    • 3-year moving average stable at c. $155K
    • current fund balance reflects conference difficulties in FY 05
  • fora:
    • attendance slowly slipping in "core" fora
    • attendance improving at new fora

present

  • recent new elections
    • old XC now in new, non-XC positions
    • new XC contains mix of new, long-time volunteers
  • working on new long-term sponsorship/support agreements
    • WWW starting 2007 (agreed in principle)
    • ICWE starting 2006 (agreed in principle)
    • CIKM starting 2006(?) (talks underway)
  • working on stronger ties to regional groups
    • GI-Hypertextsysteme (Germany)
    • SBC-Multimedia/Hypermedia (Brazil)

future

  • more work in electronic publishing
    • HT 2005 will pilot CD-only proceedings
    • considering other fora for CD-only
  • more proactive event management
    • more proactive participation in steering committees
    • different vetting process for GCs
  • new membership services centered around web site, DL
    • "members-only" areas on web site
    • central location for conference wikis, etc.
    • ACM DL binders

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