CHI 2003 Report - Local SIGs

Discussing New Horizons for SIGCHI Local Chapters at CHI 2003

Introduction
Local Chapters´ Issues
Keeping the Organization Running
National Chapters
Collaboration
CHI´s Future
Council of Chapters

Every year SIGCHI organizes the Local Chapter´s workshop at the CHI conference. The goal of the workshop is to allow for Local Chapter´s representatives from different regions, with distinct goals, activities and constituencies to come together and share their experiences, success stories and challenges. The workshop is also an open communication channel between Local Chapters and SIGCHI, through which Local Chapters can express their requests, necessities and priorities, and SIGCHI can report on what is being done and bring to the Local Chapters issues about which SIGCHI would like to hear back from them. This year the workshop focused on sharing experiences regarding relevant issues identified by the Local Chapters, the CHI conference and the Council of Chapters.

At the workshop there were 20 chapters represented. Namely, Apala Lahiri Chavan (CHI Bombay), Bill Killam (DC_CHI), Fabio Paternó (SIGCHI Italy), Gerrit van der Veer (SIGCHI.NL), Helena Mentis (CornellCHI), Jean Vanderdonckt (BelCHI), José Antonio Macías (CHISPA), Mario Moreno (CHI-Mexico), Markus Heberlein (CHI-ID), Marta Fuentealba (BayCHI), Michael Herczeg (German SIGCHI), Morten Borup Harning (SIGCHI.DK), Reinhard Sefelin (SIGCHI Austria), Roope Raisamo (SIGCHI Finland), Rosco Hill (WatCHI), Scott Weiss (NYC-CHI), Simone Barbosa (Brazil CHI), Staffan Björk (STIMDI and West Sweden CHI) and Steven Cooper (ToRCHI). I, as Vice-Chair for Chapters, introduced myself and the agenda for the meeting, and then each of the participants introduced themselves and briefly described their chapter´s activities and concerns.

During the first part of the meeting we discussed the issues identified as the most relevant by the chapters´ in their applications to the workshop. The issues were: how to keep the organization running, how to organize national chapters and how to foster collaboration among chapters. Representatives distributed themselves into groups to discuss one of the topics according to their interests. Regarding how to keep the organization running the group focused on how to get volunteers involved and active, how to get sponsorship and how to get good speakers. Some of the ideas related to how to get volunteers were to always advertise events and positions (a good time to do it is just before a meeting); ask for specific tasks as opposed to general ones, if there many volunteers doing different things have a coordinator for volunteers and if there still isn´t enough volunteers, assign duties to people.

Getting sponsorship is always a concern and a difficult task. Representatives in this group discussed how to deal with it, especially in a time like this, in which many countries are going through a difficult period for economy. Some of the ideas had as motto "do not ask for much and get something". For instance, ask companies to sponsor by allowing their employees to be active volunteers at the chapter, and take some time from work to cover for the volunteer work, or get projects to sponsor specific activities that may be related to it. Another idea would be to offer sponsors (organizations or consultants) advantages, such as time for a presentation at the chapter, but this must be well thought and discussed so that the chapter does not come across to members as commercial and conflicts of interest don´t arise. Finally another idea is to collaborate with student chapters, or have academic members actively involved so that the chapter is able to get free venues for its meetings.

Many of the chapters face the challenge of getting good speakers regularly. Even if there are some great speakers at the Chapter´s region, after a while they have all spoken at one of the meetings. The idea would be instead of having someone travel to the chapter just for the talk, and having to find a way to cover for the speakers travel costs, the best would be to invite people who have to come to the region for some other purpose and would be willing to give a talk. For that to work, we would need to have a way for chapters to announce their meetings and need for speakers, and for people to announce their trips. Local Chapters could collaborate and share their needs for speakers, as well as their members travelling agenda with other chapters.

Almost half of SIGCHI chapters´ are national chapters, or cover a large portion of their countries. Even for countries where there are a number of chapters, some of them cover a large area. The points that this group discussed were related to the pros and cons of having one national chapter representing the whole HCI community in the country versus chapters in smaller regions of the country. Some of the points raised were that chapters in smaller regions have a better chance of organizing regular meetings and being more active, as opposed to those in large areas that can count at the most on one meeting a year to bring members together. However, it is important to have an umbrella chapter or organization that can represent the national/regional community. One way to keep the larger organization active is by having an online community to foster activity and communication. This community could also stregthen the face-to-face activities being organized by the chapter. This would be equivalent to what is being done to the CHI community with CHIplace. Also the larger organization can probably better reflect the interests of the different kinds of professionals that are part of the community.

One other issue discussed was that often there are SIGCHI or Local Chapter members who are very active in their local communities, but can never make it to CHI, either due to financial reasons, or even language. The chapters value CHI and SIGCHI efforts to bring people from different communities to CHI, with programs such as the scholarship program and the development consortium. The chapters have encouraged SIGCHI and CHI chairs to continue these programs and even seek others that could bring more people to CHI.

When discussing how to keep the organization going and national chapters issues, the groups also discussed how chapters could collaborate. The group that focused specifically on collaboration, discussed the need for more collaboration among chapters, as well as with SIGCHI, ACM and other related HCI related organizations. Some of the suggestions they had were organizing video-conference between chapters, since some of them have access to video-conference technology, exchanging material from presentations, such as video-tapes (when possible), as well as meeting notes and powerpoint presentations. They also suggested that chapters used the Local Chapters list (chi-local-sigs@acm.org) more often to announce opportunities for collaborating with others, as well as ACM and SIGCHI resources to be able to send out information to potential chapter members/speakers. They also felt that ACM and SIGCHI have an important role in providing chapters with material, such as allowing the use of CHI tutorial notes, or even a summary or samples slides of the tutorial.

The CHI conference has lost money for the last 3 years, for a number of different reasons. This has caused SIGCHI Executive Committee and people involved in organizing the conference to rethink the conference and to find ways of dealing with the problem. At the workshop we took the opportunity to discuss the conference and its future. The discussion focused on how the conference supported the different communties represented by the chapters and how the chapters could participate more and support more the conference.

Representatives consider that it is necessary to have a general domain HCI event where the international community can get together and that CHI plays that role, and should continue to. They felt that there is a need to increase the awareness of what is being done in HCI in different regions of the world, that have to deal with different issues and apply different theories, methods and techniques to do so. This diversity should be better reflected at CHI, and we should work with the conference organizers to find ways of doing that, considering that CHI is so hard to publish. Participants brainstormed about how we could try and do that and came up with a number of ideas.

As for how Local Chapters can better support CHI, the obvious help is in advertising the conference to their members. Also representatives felt that chapters could organize smaller events within CHI. These events could be technical and could be proposed/submitted as CHI sessions. Also, for some chapters it would be possible to have their board meeting during the conference or some meetings that interested their chapter members. This way chapters could try and bring more members to the conference and even create a stronger relationship with SIGCHI.

The ideas generated at this discussion have been sent to the CHI 2004 chairs and they have responded saying that they are willing to work with the Local Chapters to discuss some of the ideas and to see how we could all work together for a better conference.

The last issue discussed at the workshop was the Council of Chapters proposed by SIGCHI. The idea for the Council of Chapters is that the Local Chapters would organize their own executive committee that is responsible for representing and fostering the interest of the Local Chapters to SIGCHI (for more details see http://www.sigchi.org/bulletin/2003.2/). The discussion started with the question whether this idea was or not a good one. The conclusion was that the Council of Chapters was a good idea, since it could better organize chapters, and that the chapters would have more people committed to making some of the plans and hopes of the chapters become a reality.

Participants were divided into subgroups and brainstormed about how this Council of Chapters should be organized. From the discussion of the proposals we could come up with a plan for the organization of the council. This plan is composed by: (1) the issues to be defined about how the council should work; (2) a proposed calendar for the proposal to be in place; (3) finally and most importantly volunteers to draft the first proposal for the chapter, which we have called the interim council. The issues to be defined include how to choose representatives; which should be each one´s role; how they should meet and how often; and how and when to measure the success of the council. The calendar is organized so that the proposal for the Council of Chapters could be approved by Local Chapters and SIGCHI Executive Committee in 9 months, and the first Council to be in place in one year time. Finally the members of our interim council are: Marta Fuentalba (BayCHI), Gerrit van der Veer (SIGCHI.NL), Helena Mentis (Cornell CHI), Staffan Björk (Swedish Local Chapters), Morten Borup Harning (SIGCHI.DK), Apala Lahiri Chavan (CHI Bombay) and Raquel Prates (SIGCHI EC and Brazil CHI). The interim council (chi-cc@acm.org) has just started working and is open to ideas and suggestions from all Local Chapters.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about the report, the workshop or our follow-up activities, please let me know.

Raquel O. Prates
SIGCHI Vice-Chair for Chapters