About
From November 16–18, 2026, members and leaders of the SIGCHI community will gather in Paris, France—at the Sorbonne Université—for the second SIGCHI Futures Summit. This will build on the inaugural SIGCHI Futures Summit that was held as a hybrid event from February 15–17, 2024, at the Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy.
The SIGCHI Futures Summits have been designed to create space for conversations that are difficult to hold within the compressed schedules and immediate demands of our conferences, giving us the opportunity to collectively reflect on the long-term future of SIGCHI’s conferences and conference communities, identify emerging opportunities and challenges, and shape priorities for the years ahead.
Agenda
The detailed agenda is under development. For now, we provide an overview.
Day 1: Outward
We will begin by looking beyond SIGCHI to consider the larger structures within which our conferences and communities operate.
This day will bring perspectives from across ACM and its Special Interest Groups (SIGs) into conversation with members of SIGCHI. We will examine broad developments affecting scholarly communities, especially including the growing role of AI in research and publishing, evolving conference and participation models amidst geopolitical and other shifts, and changing relationships among publication, presentation, and community-building.
Our goal is not only to understand how these changes are affecting SIGCHI, but also to identify where our community’s expertise can contribute to the conversations taking place across ACM and beyond. Day 1 welcomes participation from members of the broader community (within SIGCHI and beyond).
Day 2: Inward
On the second day—while still open to all—we will turn our attention to SIGCHI’s own conferences and communities.
SIGCHI encompasses conferences of very different sizes, histories, formats, geographies, and constituencies. While each conference and community is unique, many of the challenges that face us are shared: broadening participation, supporting volunteers, improving accessibility, managing financial uncertainty, adapting conference formats, and sustaining meaningful connections across a geographically distributed community.
This day is designed to create opportunities for conference and community leaders to learn from one another, surface common needs, and explore where greater coordination or shared infrastructure could help. It will also make time for us to consider how our conferences collectively advance SIGCHI’s wider mission — not only as publication venues, but as spaces for intellectual exchange, professional development, mentorship, and belonging, for the field of Human-Computer Interaction as a whole.
Day 3: Forward
The final day will focus on turning discussion into direction.
We will identify the ideas that warrant further development, the questions that require broader community consultation, and the initiatives that SIGCHI should action and take forward. Rather than treating the Summit as a self-contained meeting, we want it to serve as the beginning — or rather, continuation — of work that carries into our committees, conferences, communities, and future planning. Still open to all, we would like especially those in steering/organizing roles to stay with us for Day 3.
Our aim is to leave Paris with a clearer understanding of our shared priorities, greater alignment across SIGCHI, and concrete pathways for action.
Resources
These resources may be useful to those attending the Summit, or any of the online sessions and coffee hours that are being held before and after (announced via the SIGCHI-Members listserv and socials).
Running notes from the pre-Summit SIGCHI Conferences Coffee Hours
Blog post on volunteering in SIGCHI from the Volunteering Coffee Hour