Vinayagamoorthy and I am here with Adriana Vivacqua; We are SIGCHI’s Adjunct Chairs
for Equity.
In this presentation, we want to start off by highlighting some resources available to
the community. After that I’d like to talk about some work I have been undertaking in
order to design a set of guidelines that could be used to improve the diversity of participation
in our conferences. And then, Adriana will talk about her work in building a committee
amongst HCI researchers and practitioners in Latin America.
The SIGCHI website is a good place to find a lot of helpful information including interesting
blog posts that might shed insights into various policies or activities put in place by the
Executive Committee (EC). One such blog post was written by our Adjunct Chair for CHI - Regan
Mandryk - on how CHI conference venues and dates are selected. There is a SIGCHI Community
Calendar which lets our community tell us about upcoming holidays of significance in
addition to publicising events. It’s a great resource to reference if you are trying to
organise a conference or workshop and you want to make sure that there are no clashes.
Neha Kumar (VP at Large) wrote a blog about the calendar if you want more details.
Quite recently, Neha also organised a set of Equity ‘roundtable’ talks. We have
been inviting the community to discuss relevant topics to do with ‘being global’, ‘improving
accessibility’, ‘reviewing & mentorship’ and many more, and we invite you to participate
in the upcoming talks. These have been recorded and will be documented in detailed blog posts.
SIGCHI CARES is another very important resource for conferences and the community. CARES is
a space for anyone who has experienced discrimination
or harassment to find help. Each conference
has an assigned SIGCHI CARES member; For CHI 2021, your SIGCHI CARES person is Rina Wehbe.
Please contact Shaowen Bardzell (VP at Large) who chairs the SIGCHI CARES committee for
more information.
Some funding mechanisms are available for the community. The SIGCHI Development Fund
grants (SDF) enable community-led initiatives to improve diversity. The Gary Marsden Travel
Awards (GMTA) funds participation in conferences for students and early career researchers.
You can find more information about these opportunities on the SIGCHI website or through
contacting Neha Kumar.
Specialised Conference Development Funds are available for SIGCHI conferences, to help
fund and try out novel activities that improve the conference in some way. You can get more
information by contacting the VP for Conferences (Andrew Kun).
While I am here, I’d like to extend an open invite to contact us for just about anything
- questions or suggestions - we will be happy to hear from you.
One of the projects I have been working on is to design a set of guidelines that might
help our family of conferences to adopt sustainable
policies and initiatives to encourage diverse
growth (participation), add in a healthy dose of inclusive thinking across multiple dimensions
of diversity depending on the type of conference in question. Work is still ongoing and currently
most effort has been going towards having conversations with various steering committees
in a bid to find out how different groups of people are tracking the issue... tackling
the issue even. Findings
will be published eventually but for starters here are a few suggestions.
Roll D&I thinking into long term strategy through focusing efforts on multiple fronts
with a dedicated person to look into issues concerning diversity & inclusion.
It’s helpful to be specific in what role of this...
in what the role of this dedicated person is. What focus
most benefits your conference? In your search for an inspirational keynote
or specialised panel, look to introduce someone you’d think of as pushing traditions.
Be mindful of setting important dates including deadlines. Refer to the SIGCHI community calendar
for help. Try and bring in new people to carry on the
organisation of the conference and transfer knowledge to them.
SIGCHI has also been undertaking efforts to increase its global presence, by reaching
out to HCI communities across the globe, with a special emphasis on underrepresented regions.
Current efforts involve engaging in conversation with the African, Middle Eastern and South
Asia communities, through their chapters and local leadership. Similar efforts were undertaken
in Latin America and we have recently established a SIGCHI Latin America committee, a process
initiated by the SIGCHI Development Fund. SIGCHI has also had an Asia Committee for
6 years now, which has grown in size in the past few years.
Getting in touch with the local communities was the first step in all of these efforts,
as they can help understand and navigate local issues. Local SIGCHI chapters, HCI conferences
and scientific associations are valuable resources
that can provide entry points to these communities.
I’m happy to introduce the SIGCHI Latin America Committee members:
Myself and Sane Gaytan, from Universidad de Colima, México will be acting as co-chairs;
Francisco Gutierrez, from Universidad de Chile; Gustavo López Herrera, from Universidad de
Costa Rica, Heloisa Candello
from IBM Research, Brasil;
Leonel Morales Díaz, from Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala;
Luis Castro, from Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora, México;
Marisol Wong-Villacres, from Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, Ecuador;
Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar,
currently at MIT, originally from Colombia and
Roberto Pereira, from Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brasil.
They should provide an additional point of entry into the Latin American HCI community,
and help create new information flows to enable mutual learning. The group will be working
closely with VP at large Neha Kumar and EC President Helena Mentis, and you should expect
to hear from them in the coming months! More details on this committee will be documented
in upcoming blog posts.
Thank you and should you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
We are getting better at this!
Oh yes we are