Open session: June 29, 2022

The June open meeting covered a variety of topics.

Recording, YouTube.

Neha Kumar, SIGCHI President, opens noting that the second year of the EC term will begin on July 1, 2022. Two elected members will be stepping down from their roles - Shaowen Bardzell, serving as Executive Vice President, and Tamara Clegg, serving as Vice President for Communications - which resulted in new appointments. Andrew Kun, previously the VP of Finance, is the new Executive Vice President and the VP of Finance role will be filled by Luigi De Russis, formerly Adjunct Chair for Community Support. Simone Kriglstein will now be the new VP of Comms. Two posts that are now vacant - adjunct chair for Community Support and Knowledge Sharing - but want to focus on the needs before posting an open call.

Proposal of SIGCHI Development Fund (Dev Fund) badges. Luigi De Russis, Adjunct Chair for Community Support. For context, Neha explains that badges are generally used to convey a commitment to a set of values. Luigi begins by explaining what the SIGCHI Development Fund is. For more information, visit the SIGCHI website. Event organizers are asking how to make their community events more accessible, safe, sustainable, etc... and how can the SIGCHI Dev Fund better support the community event organizers in upholding SIGCHI values? The proposal being discussed would be for the EC to develop guidelines for event organizers, badges for events that adopt these guidelines, and make these mandatory for approved projects under the SIGCHI dev fund. While applying for funding, event organizers will need to commit to follow one or more guideline(s) of their own choice and as a promise to be eligible for the funds. Once funding is approved, the event can add the badges to the website as a signal to its commitment to their audience. Additionally, events that do not need support from the SIGCHI Dev Fund, canask for the badge(s) as a commitment to following the guidelines for their events. This will not go into effect until the EC has voted on it.

SIGCHI Chapters - New Initiatives. Matt Jones, Vice-President for Chapters. The vision is to take the hidden super power of SIGCHI (the Chapters) and project it to make it more visible, more globally purposeful. Two initiatives - (1.) Enriching connection and perspectives and (2.) Capacity building. For the first initiative, the Chapters are hoping to have a fund that will allow one chapter in one area to connect and travel (if necessary) in order to learn from each other's perspectives on best practices and build up future collaborations between those chapters. Chapters are also looking into how they can involve students more. This work should be looking at and reporting on these by November 2022. For the second initiative, the Chapters committee will be looking into new and improved training resources based on best practices. One concept they would like to focus on is to have "Grow and Nuture funding" to run events with the help of the Chapter Committee along with one-on-one check-ins with Chapter Leaders and online open meetings that occur monthly. The community is encouraged to reach out to Matt directly with new initiatives that might come about and/or join the Chapters slack channel to have all chapters represented.

Sustainability Proposal - Offsetting Conference Impact through Donations. Nic Bidwell, Adjunct Chair for Sustainability. Through the efforts of the CHI23 Sustainability Chairs, the EC was prompted to consider the SIGCHI policy for offsetting and how to fund that. When we think about offsetting, the EC wants a sustainable and real world impact with different environmental impacts that get participant to engage with the problem. One option is to refer to ACM's Offset Program works with Cool Effect which is a 501(c)(3) that purchases carbon offset (www.cooleffects.com/projects). The other option would be to consider direct donations to local projects. The question is how are these options funded? ACM's Policy - Funding Option 1: Attendees make their own contribution through the registration website; Funding Option 2: Conference Organizers add in a budgeted donation based on anticipated conference attendance. SIGs would cover this from fund balances; Funding Option 3: Raise the registration fee to include a donation of $10-25 per conference attendee which would be an opt-in/out. For next steps, SIGCHI will vote on a policy for all conferences, guided by the Community and the CHI'23 preferences.

ACM TechNews - SIGCHI Edition. Neha Kumar, President. What is the community opinion on keeping it, changing it, scrapping it all together? One suggestion would be to ask the readers about the future of tech news in terms of its usefulness. Should it be repurposed based onSIGCHI's 40 year anniversary?

Open Calls for Additional Committees and/or Members.

• The Hybrid Working Group (Adriana Vivacqua) which is meant to think about hybrid and hybrid solutions and follow up on experiments and trials that conferences have done in order to provide guidelines to future conference organizers. The goal would be to collect ideas and giving guidance/tool set for organizers to rely on. If you are interested in joining, reach out through the open call.

• The Publications Committee (Pejman Mirza-Babaei) is now looking for volunteers to join, to focus on key initiatives which include working with community members on issues related to ACM supporting conference leaders in a beta publication pipeline and also thinking about how the future of SIGCHI publications would look like. This committee is particularly looking for people with experience in publication-related roles, such as paper chairs or technical program chairs. Those interested can nominate or volunteer through the open call.

• The Global Committee (Adriana Vivacqua) is looking for people interested in a commitment to geographic diversity and determining how we can: include people in different locations that sometimes can't travel, become more global and more diverse, create new channels of communication and knowledge exchange beyond our own SIGCHI communities and reaching throughout the world.

• The Futuring Committee (Luigi De Russis) is looking for early professionals or students that will be able to think and experiment on different initiatives that they can bring up. They also could receive funding to to do experiments in order to bring the SIGCHI initiatives into the future.

• The Equity Committee (Cale Passmore) is looking for volunteers that are committed to helping shape our culture of inclusion and safety so that's around events conferences research standards of behavior safety. Some of the upcoming initiatives include creating Community wide bystander and ally training, data gathering around community needs for equity, and creating equity standards and programming around organizational safety and inclusion.

• The Comms Committee (Simone Kriglstein) is looking for volunteers that are willing to share knowledge, review analytics, and help keep the SIGCHI social media channels and website up to date.

• The Community Support Committees (Luigi De Russis) are looking to increase both committees with volunteers that would like to help review the applications or submissions, depending on the SIGCHI Dev Fund or GMTA involvement, as well as thinking and proposing possible changes to both programs to better support people.

Updates. A reminder that the CHI Steering Committee has it's annual Open Call for CHI Leadership. Naomi provided an update on the TOCHI Journal - it is now a benefit for all members to receive access to the tool. New SIGCHI Membership rates, down to almost half of what they used to be, are also in effect on July 1. Lastly, the EC has been talking with the Council of Steering Committee Chairs regarding conferences and guidelines around food safety and hybridity concerns that come up, under the leadership of VP Conferences Susanne Boll.