Inaugural EC Meeting

The SIGCHI Executive Committee held its first meeting of the term to get to know one another, discuss handoffs, and start formulating goals for the rest of the calendar year. Meeting notes are below:

Our inaugural meeting for the new Executive Committee term was attended by 13 of our 15 members. 

We waited for ~3 minutes until most people were on the call. 

Neha then set the intent for the call. She noted that first, in this meeting, we want to make sure we all know who the others are, because it is teamwork that makes the dream work. Second, we want to set some goals and timelines for us collectively for the next 2 months, according to folks’ availability or holidays during the summer and as academic years start. 

Everyone then introduced themselves, addressing the following questions:

• What is your name/role?

• What do you care about most vis-a-vis SIGCHI?

• What does success on this team look like to you?

• What is the #1 thing you would want others on the team to know about you?

Things that people cared about most ranged from broader to more specific goals. Some cared about the wellbeing of conferences and the community overall. Some wanted to see a more connected and empowered community, with a stronger sense of togetherness despite differences. Others mentioned inclusivity, openness, and transparency. Others discussed growing the community by better demonstrating the value of membership and infrastructures like chapters. Some members mentioned mentorship, accessibility, and financial stability and accountability. We ended with a vision of ensuring that research and practice within the SIGCHI community can be a driving force for technology to positively impact the world. 

To many EC members, success on the EC looked like strong collaboration and teamwork, delegation and sharing of responsibilities, and, ultimately, solidifying concrete change and enactment of core values. 

Finally, many EC members wanted one another to know that we are people with whole lives, juggling multiple work responsibilities or caring for family. We also shared important aspects of our working and communication styles, hopefully setting us up for stronger teamwork. 

Following introductions, we talked about the next two months and how we could work best asynchronously, with Neha/Luigi offering help as possible. Neha suggested no open meetings until after September, to accommodate travel, holidays, and other responsibilities EC members are navigating. This time could be used to focus on our vision and goals, terms of engagement (e.g., code of conduct, protocols for taking time off, etc.), and open calls for positions that need to be filled. 

We then discussed handoffs from those on the prior EC to those on the current one. In some cases this is unnecessary (e.g., Finance, Pres/EVP, Awards, Chapters). The roles have also been reconfigured somewhat (e.g., Conferences). We decided to write up a summary of what was accomplished in the previous term in a blog post, while focusing on future goals in this meeting. 

We then considered the idea of potential resets of committees. Many of our committees have not been reorganized for many years and multiple EC terms. Neha proposed the idea of doing open calls across committees to allow our volunteers to re-express an intent to serve, for new chairs to identify and recruit new members potentially, for volunteers to switch across volunteer roles if they prefer, etc. We will first think through the pros and cons of doing this, and check in with committee chairs about this idea. 

We then discussed open calls. At this point, we plan to recruit a VP Ops, VP Pubs, AC Community Support, and AC Sustainability. We are gathering text for these open calls at the moment. Neha welcomed any suggestions for who we think could apply to serve in these roles. There was also a brief discussion of how these roles would be filled in the interim, and whether EC members needed any support to continue related work. 

We moved on to consider potentially doing a set of leadership training workshops with a certified coach. This will help us work on team-building, understanding how we could work best together, and having a set of resources we can turn to when the going gets tough. We decided this could wait until pending roles are filled and the whole EC is in place. 

Matt then introduced the Conferences Wellbeing Team (including himself, Ignacio, and Jerry). He noted that the goal is to make conferences feel valued, as well as get things done. Nacho will be working on streamlining daily operations, such as various approvals that conferences need. Jerry will be taking a systemic and data-driven view of conferences to bridge conference communities, knowledge, and best practices. Matt will be focusing on relationship-building with conferences. Other EC members noted that recent data collected, such as the site selection working group’s survey, could be helpful in this work. 

To end the meeting, Neha went over a charge letter that she wrote for the EC for the next 6 months. EC members should work with Neha/Luigi to make edits/additions to the living document. The goal is to ensure that all members are on the same page and know what other members are working on.