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