Hi! I’m Neha Kumar, SIGCHI Vice-President at Large.
I’m also an associate professor at Georgia Tech.
My pronouns are she/her.
No matter where we’re listening from right now, I’d like to first acknowledge, this
past year has been difficult on many fronts.
And it has pushed us, the SIGCHI community, to preserve and strengthen existing ties and
discover new ones, relying almost entirely on virtual ways of functioning.
As the SIGCHI Development Fund (or the SDF) Committee, which I am honored to lead, Adriana,
Luigi, Naveena, Vikram, and I have been grappling with this very challenge over the past year—of
building a stronger, thriving, virtual SIGCHI community...
to ensure that SIGCHI members across the globe feel free to participate, are informed of
avenues to participate, are supported in this participation, and find value in it.
To this end, we redesigned or launched these initiatives that I will touch on briefly:
the SIGCHI Development Fund, the Gary Marsden Travel Awards, Regional SIGCHI Committees,
the Community Events and Holidays Calendars, Voices of SIGCHI, Ask-Me-Anything sessions,
and SIGCHI’s Equity Talks.
The Development Fund supports community initiatives that promote diverse, equitable, and inclusive
participation, offering up to 5000 US dollars for mainly virtual activity at present.
The links here will tell you about the SDF, how to apply, and give you examples of what
we’ve funded.
On the right, you see listed the 22 project proposals that the SDF committee has evaluated,
iterated on, and approved for funding this past year.
Next, Naveena and I led an in-depth redesign of our travel awards programs, to be more
streamlined, flexible, transparent, and most importantly, responsive to the needs of our
community.
With the links on this slide, you can read about this redesign, apply, and check out
the outcomes of our most recent awards cycle.
In red here, you can see the names of those who have supported us in making this change.
Regional SIGCHI committees help build HCI capacity across cultures and geographies,
connecting chapters to provide enhanced opportunities for participation, and strengthen ties across
borders.
The Asian Development Committee or ADC was already in existence.
The SIGCHI Latin America Committee was just set up this last year.
This effort was co-led by Adriana, who is also one of our ACs for Equity.
We’re working now to build partnerships with our colleagues in Africa, and hope that
next year we’ll have more to report on this front.
When the pandemic pushed all events online, our committee began to populate a community
events calendar.
This effort was led by Vikram, to make it possible for individuals to partake of events
happening anywhere in the world as long as they were open.
So you or anyone can add your event to this calendar, and check out events of interest.
Oftentimes, SIGCHI events and deadlines overlap with cultural and religious holidays.
In order to plan these better and more inclusively, our committee—led again by Vikram—created
the SIGCHI Holidays Calendar for tracking (and hopefully avoiding) these unfortunate
overlaps.
In the event that such overlap cannot be avoided, we recommend that conference organizers offer
an explanation and support to their community.
The Voices of SIGCHI blog series offers stories and lessons learned from individuals and groups
doing HCI around the world.
We’ve heard from our Korean, South Asian, Latin American, and Arab HCI communities.
We’re learning how different conferences are doing their best to be inclusive as they
go virtual.
And we’ve also become more familiar with the history of CHI through decades-old videos.
If you’d like to share your voice in this effort, we’re happy to help!
In support of the EC’s efforts to improve communication with the community at large,
we coordinated a series of Ask-Me-Anything sessions or AMAs in late 2020.
These were mainly focused on generating wider understanding about SIGCHI roles and responsibilities.
You can watch these videos on our YouTube channel.
We’re now in the middle of organizing our first ever Equity Talks.
These are roundtable discussions with the community, conducted with the aim of informing
the incoming EC about work that needs doing to promote equity on several fronts.
We’re super grateful to the folks here in red who have supported this massive undertaking.
I’ll conclude now with a question I frequently pose, which is: How would you like the SIGCHI
EC to mobilize support to groups within SIGCHI, fostering participation and growth—locally
and globally?
Email us anytime at sigchi-4all@acm.org or use your vote in the upcoming elections!
On behalf of the SIGCHI Development Fund Committee, I thank you for listening.
We remain globally yours :-).