Hi everyone, my name is Neha Kumar
and I’m SIGCHI Vice-President at Large.
And I will be giving you an update on SIGCHI Community Support.
The goal of Community Support is to provide support
to all SIGCHI sub-communities,
fostering participation and growth across the board.
And the question we ask here is:
how might we make sure that every SIGCHI member
feels that they are free to participate,
informed of avenues to participate,
supported in this participation,
and also find value in it?
What does Community Support currently include?
There's many different initiatives.
First, and foremost there is the SIGCHI Development Fund
which is a large fund dedicated to
supporting community events and initiatives that are
aligned with SIGCHI’s strategic initiatives.
I’ll come to those in a second.
There’s also the SIGCHI Student Travel Grants that
support student travel to conferences and events.
There's the Gary Marsden Fund which supports student travel
from the Global South in particular.
And the Early Career Mentorship Fund
which is meant to support early career professionals in the
HCI world.
In addition, there is Community Support for chapters,
for which our Chapters VP
Eunice Sari has shared an update as well.
And then there’s the Asia Development Committee, whose
focus has been HCI capacity building within Asia,
led by a very active group of HCI researchers
and practitioners in the region.
What are SIGCHI’s strategic initiatives? These are
1. Grow our membership to
reflect the community.
2. Ensure scalability of our
organization and conferences.
3. Enhance HCI knowledge distribution.
4. Promote inclusivity.
5. Support local and global HCI.
With Community Support our goal is to promote
as many of these as possible.
In terms of initiatives,
these are the ones that we are currently focusing on:
First, there's the SIGCHI Development Fund call
for virtual events and initiatives.
You can find this on sigchi.submittable.com
and the deadline to apply is
midnight, July 15, anywhere on earth.
Then we have a virtual events calendar
which we are aiming to put together by
crowdsourcing event information from HCI-related
events across the world, so that even though
travel remains restricted, we can reach as many
of our members virtually as possible.
Then there’s our Voices of SIGCHI initiative, which is
really a section of our Medium publication
dedicated to drawing attention to and
celebrating the richness and diversity of our
global community.
Moving Forward, what are we going to be busy doing?
Well in the immediate future, we plan
to revisit and redesign SIGCHI Travel Support.
So we plan to combine our Gary Marsden Fund,
SIGCHI Student Travel Grants, and the
Early Career Mentorship Fund. And we will be calling this
the Gary Marsden Fund to continue to honor the memory of Gary Marsden.
We’re going to think deeply here about
how to factor in different underrepresented groups
within our community, while also still
prioritizing participation from the Global South,
which was a cause that Gary Marsden was dedicated to
for much of his life.
We are working also towards consolidating support for
events and initiatives to make the process of support
more fair, more inclusive, and uniformly
accessible across the board.
And finally we’d like to foster a global “community feeling”
across SIGCHI.
Which is to help promote an identity that is truly global,
ensuring that we make the time and
effort to build bridges across borders and to
move forward together.
But there’s much more that we could be doing and that’s my
question to you. What more could we be doing
according to you? Tell any of us, because
we are not a small group.
Our team consists first and foremost of five advisors.
These are Sane, Susan, Pushpendra,
Kaveh, and Zhengjie
— that’s the top row. And they've all
spent many, many years in their efforts to foster global
diversity within HCI. And then on the
SIGCHI Development Fund committee, we have
Naveena, Adriana, Luigi, Vikram, and Loren.
I’m very grateful for the efforts of all of these
volunteers who meet regularly, weigh in on our
plans and initiatives together, and are deeply
passionate about a truly global SIGCHI community.
With that, I come to the end of my short presentation.
Thank you for listening. If you have any
further questions at all, or any suggestions, please get in touch.
Our email is sigchi-dev-fund@acm.org.
Again, my name is Neha Kumar, and I’m
happy to be at your service.