SIGCHI is pleased to announce that Andrew Kun has been appointed interim ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences from Jan 2020. At this time, our current ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences (Aaron Quigley) will step back to focus on his volunteer role as CHI 2021 general chair. Andrew will begin immediately shadowing the current SIGCHI VP for conferences. The VP Confs role currently involves:
- Providing advice to the chairs of upcoming conferences (by updating our guide) and supporting the steering committee chairs
- Overseeing all aspects of SIGCHI-sponsored conferences
- Making recommendations to the SIGCHI Executive Committee on conference matters
- Making recommendations to the President on requests from conferences for SIGCHI sponsorship, co-sponsorship, and in-cooperation status, and on budgets and other conference requests requiring SIGCHI approval
- Making recommendations to the Executive Committee on policies affecting SIGCHI-sponsored, co-sponsored, and in-cooperation conferences
- Reporting to the Executive Committee periodically on the programmatic and financial status of the CHI conference and all other SIGCHI-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences
- Working with the Vice-President for Membership and Communications to coordinate volunteer development, and to coordinate conference attendee/membership surveys
- Working with the Vice President for Publications on issues related to the paper review process for archival conferences.
Commenting on this appointment, Aaron said, “I’m looking forward to working closely with Andrew in the months ahead. We have already been working well as members of the ACM SIGCHI Conferences working group. Andrew’s experience as AutoUI steering committee co-chair will serve him well in the myriad of challenges faced in his new role. I’m particularly excited to be handing over to Andrew as our new Global Community Development for Conferences (GCDC) policy has just been approved. Following through on this policy, and encouraging it across our family of conferences presents him an exciting opportunity for the next few years.” Commenting on his appointment, Andrew added “I’m delighted to have the opportunity to serve as Interim SIGCHI VP for Conferences. I’m looking forward to supporting our vibrant community in sharing our research with the world.”
SIGCHI undertook an open and targeted recruitment process to determine both the ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences and this interim role. In June of 2018, the SIGCHI president issued an Open Call for the SIGCHI EC Vice President Positions. This resulted in Aaron Quigley being re-appointed the ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences until the start of 2020 when a new interim ACM SIGCHI Vice President for Conferences would be appointed.
Following lessons learned from this open call, a follow up call was issued to the ACM SIGCHI council of steering committee chairs, members of the ACM SIGCHI steering committees and ACM SIGCHI Conferences Working Group. Applications were invited from any member of any ACM SIGCHI sponsored conference steering committees (inc the chair), any member the ACM SIGCHI Conferences Board or any member of the Conferences Working Group.
The essential criteria included, having been a chair of a SIGCHI sponsored conference (or the ability to demonstrate commensurate experience) and the desirable criteria were having been a chair of a SIGCHI sponsored conference steering committee (or can demonstrate commensurate experience) and demonstrated abilities to manage volunteers and groups.
A committee appointed by the SIGCHI president conducted the interviews of the candidates who applied. Following this a recommended candidate was put forward to the SIGCHI EC, who was considered and approved. The intention is that the incoming VP Confs can shadow at the Oct/Nov EC meetings in time to begin the interim role in January 2020.
