EC Working, November 15, 2023

The November 2023 EC working meeting covered a variety of topics.

Kathrin and Cayley did introductions and clarified their roles and responsibilities on the EC. Kathrin would be in charge of all things hybrid, while Cayley would be overseeing CARES and equity/safety.

Neha gave an update on open calls re: site selection and advisory council (not yet closed). She asked if anyone had any wishlist items, or just words of caution. Matt mentioned that the trouble with experience was that it baked in certain categories of people. He asked us to frame it in a way that encourages people who haven't got conventional experience or worldview to join us. Neha also clarified that the motivation for the advisory council was to make work and influence visible.

The update on awards was that Niklas Elmqvist, who had just joined as AC for Awards, was already on top of everything. We also discussed possibilities for new award proposals, including education, mentorship, community engagement, mid-career awards, a rising star award, and a collective award. Adriana and Nicholas will talk about the Distinguished Speaker Program, to come up with more names and nominations than just the Academy.

The next topic was Open Access. Neha, Pejman, and Susanne mentioned the current conversations on OA with different conferences. Neha mentioned that she was working on a blog post.

Neha, Joe Konstan, and Cliff Lampe have been talking about the relationship between the steering committee and the EC, particularly on topics of common concern such as our finances. There is also a conversation around CHI 26 regarding site selection.

The next topic was task management. We plan to look into hiring virtual assistants to help with note-taking, scheduling, and other administrative tasks that are currently expanding uncontrollably.

We voted on ethics committee chairs, Melissa and Cosmin. We also voted on awards subcommittee chairs, Liz, Gerber and Ian Oakley.

Neha asked DJ if there were any next steps with regards to conferences and accessibility. DJ said that he would be drafting an email for our members to contribute to best practices to accompany the accessibility guidelines for conferences.

The annual report for ACM is overdue so we should get that done and sent over. Neha will figure out what it needs.

Naomi is proposing a vote that we allow a type of membership that does not include paying for Interactions, for those who would like to be more sustainable. Matt asked what would happen if all of our community went electronic only. Pejman mentioned that we were only covering a portion of the production cost for interactions. Luigi added that we would continue to pay the same exact amount, so there would be no financial advantage in one direction or the other.

Neha mentioned that there is a New Members Guide that she had put together, and some members had given input on it. The goal was to minimize information that we present because new members can easily get overwhelmed and we have had about 2000 new members this year. This guide would help new members get oriented around what SIGCHI is, what its programs are, where to look for member benefits, and so on. This is not really high stakes. It's just an introduction.

The update on the website was that we would be going live the following weekend. The current website will still exist, but with a banner that says it is the old website and the new website will link back to old pages in the cases that we don't have those pages already. There is still cleaning up to be done.

Neha has created a "Finishing Up" document, which is basically a spreadsheet of links. It will allow us to index the documents that we consider this EC's deliverables. For example there are CSCC sessions, revisions of policies, proposals for things, and there's a lot more. All EC members are encouraged to add their accomplishments to this table.

Keith made a proposal for scheduling our meetings in 2024. There would be two sessions for open meetings 12 hours apart to accommodate different time zones.

Helena suggested that we add Lucia to our invites, since we always have an ACM question. Keith mentioned that he had heard back from Lucia and she would be able to join us for our Rio meeting for one hour on Friday.