SIGCHI Town Hall

The town hall opened with an overview by Neha Kumar, SIGCHI President, of the organization’s current status and recent developments. SIGCHI remains the largest ACM SIG, with roughly 5,600 members across 82 active chapters and 28 conferences. With more than 4,600 Digital Library entries in the past year, the community continues to be both globally distributed and highly active, driven largely by volunteer contributions.

Neha then went over the slides from the SIGCHI town hall at CHI 25. She recapped the two major conversations we sought to facilitate, namely the upcoming transition to ACM Open, and how to ensure the well-being of the community and conferences. She also went over SIGCHI's committees, falling under the category of community and care, conferences and publishing, and global and local. She ended with sharing about SIGCHI's outreach at CHI 25, including the SIGCHI lounge, equity office hours, and various opportunities to engage conference leaders. A moment was taken to recognize the full slate of recipients of SIGCHI awards, as well as of special recognitions, which are new and aim to identify new areas for awards to be proposed.

A significant portion of the town hall focused on the transition to ACM Open, which takes effect on January 1, 2026. Under the new model, ACM’s publications will shift from pay-to-read to pay-to-publish. At the time of the town hall, about 80 percent of SIGCHI authors were already covered through their institutions, and both ACM and SIGCHI were working on waivers and discount structures for those who are not. Importantly, papers submitted in 2025 for publication in 2026 will be subject to the new rules.

Ayman Shamma, general co-chair of CHI 26 with Nuria Oliver, presented detailed updates on the conference. CHI 2026 will run as a five-day conference from Monday to Friday, with papers presented in the morning and other sessions—posters, workshops, meetups, and panels—taking place in the afternoon. The papers track and revise-and-resubmit will remain largely the same. The rest of the conference will be reorganized around the type of presentation/experience rather than specific content (e.g., posters can feature a case study, an alt.chi style submission, a late-breaking work). Workshops will be included as part of regular registration rather than requiring an additional fee. Meetups will serve the function of SIGs and BoFs. The Doctoral Consortium will be broadened into a more inclusive student mentoring program. Regarding hybrid, remote presentation will still be permitted for authors unable to travel, and keynote sessions will continue to be livestreamed.

The meeting then shifted to the SIGCHI financial report, presented by VP Finance Hao-Chuan Wang. For FY25, SIGCHI saw approximately $7 million in revenue against $6.4 million in expenses, resulting in a surplus of $588,000. The reserve balance stands at about $4.4 million, and the EC expects that the fiscal outlook for FY26 will be stable given the planning we are doing for the ACM Open transition.

The conferences team provided a final set of updates, noting the introduction of new SIGCHI-sponsored conferences Interactive Health and Critical Computing. The team has made efforts to streamline processes like TMRF submissions, improve communications with general chairs and steering committees, and standardize conference closure procedures.

The meeting concluded with a brief reminder that notes would be shared afterward and that participants were welcome to continue sending feedback or questions through the usual channels.