Every year, the SIGCHI Executive Committee and the CHI Steering Committee hold a Town Hall event at the CHI conference to share updates from our organization and to field questions from the community. With the disruption in the physical conference this year, committees have made videos with updates you can watch.

We also solicited questions from the community, to which the rest of this post responds.

In terms of process, we included all questions, except those that were entirely off topic [as an example, “Why is Cliff Lampe so ugly?”]. We did not change the wording of questions at all. They are clustered around themes below. The questions were answered by the SIGCHI EC and the General Chairs for CHI 2021 and CHI 2022.

CHI 2021

If COVID-19 continues, what are the plans for a virtual conference?

The organisers for CHI 2021 are exploring a hybrid conference model. This would consist of a physical (aka “real-world conference”) coupled with an “online conference” event with both in-person (local) and remote delegates. Any physical restrictions in place in May of 2021 will dictate how much of a physical/online event versus entirely online event will take place. For more details see this dedicated post on COVID-19 on the CHI 2021 website.

Is there any chance that the authors of papers accepted this year will have a chance to present their papers/posters/demos on CHI 2021 as well?

Archival content (i.e., full papers) cannot be presented at 2021, and we are working on events that will highlight the full papers over this year. We worked with SIGCHI and the ACM to invite authors to upload presentations of their full papers to the ACM DL, which we will highlight so that these authors get exposure for their work.

In terms of non-archival content, those proposing Workshops, SIGs, Panels or Courses in 2021 are asked if this is a re-submission of work that was accepted to CHI 2020. They note that such submissions will be given special consideration but are not automatically accepted. Importantly, a re-submission that was accepted to CHI 2020 is encouraged to update the submission taking into account the changed landscape since 2020 and the ACM Author Rights. The Student Game Competition chairs are exploring making space for authors of an accepted CHI 2020 Game Design Competition submission to briefly demo their game at CHI 2021. The interactivity program is determined to help authors display their accepted CHI 2020 Interactivities that were not shown due to COVID-19 please visit the call for interactivity for more details. In addition the authors of CHI 2020 full papers were invited to submit video presentations to be added to the ACM digital library and YouTube.

However, given the limited time and space at the conference venue, it is difficult for us to provide opportunities for all authors from CHI 2020 to present their work at 2021. The venue for CHI 2021 was planned and has been contracted several years in advance and each year CHI receives thousands of submissions across many tracks. Fitting everything in each year is already a challenge, so doubling what is presented is not possible given the space and time constraints.

What are your thoughts about CHI 2021?

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted many people around the world, including members of the CHI community. The organisers of CHI 2021 recognise this has disrupted day to day life, interrupted research activities worldwide, impacted CHI 2020 and the family of SIGCHI conferences and introduced a large degree of stress and uncertainty with respect to future conference submission and events scheduled for 2021. This post describes how the CHI 2021 volunteers and organisers are responding.

As the plans for the hybrid-conference event for CHI 2021 develop, the CHI 2021 website will be updated. This post also introduces some of the guidance the CHI 2021 tracks offer for authors with work from 2020.

When will we know if CHI 2021 in Japan will be held in-person? Are there plans for a virtual conference if we are unable to hold CHI 2021 in-person due to Covid-19?

The organisers for CHI 2021 are exploring a hybrid conference model. This would consist of a physical (aka “real-world conference”) coupled with an “online conference” event with both in-person (local) and remote delegates. Planning is underway so that we can assess how much of an in-person vs online event we will plan for. This will be reflected in the registration available when we open this later. Any physical restrictions in place in May of 2021 will dictate how much of a physical/online event versus entirely online event will take place. The 2021 organisers will be using social media, the conference website and emails to mailing lists to keep the community updated as plans develop.

SIGCHI Finances

How are we doing with the whole pandemic thing? What is the best case and worst case scenario for SIGCHI in terms of budgets, future plans, etc.?

The pandemic is hitting our community hard — it is placing volunteer organizers in a difficult position of having to take on complex decisions in uncharted territory. And, they need to do this while everything around them is in chaos. The same is true of our colleagues at ACM — they must deal with many events and support them as they move from physical venues to online events.

The pandemic has also been a significant strain on SIGCHI finances. Our community (like others) faces cancellation fees. Our members face personal financial stress, which might translate into reduced ability to pay attendance fees.

To address the above issues we are working as a community. This is the main reason why the SIGCHI EC has voted that individual conferences are not going to bear the burden of cancellation costs alone — we will do this as a community. It is also why the EC voted to update our overhead policy and attempt to maintain a reasonable influx of funds which will allow SIGCHI to continue to support the community. This includes supporting conferences by providing PCS, CVENT, QOALA, the work of the video team, etc.

Our community is also working to develop models of online events that work for SIGCHI, and for each of the sub-communities of our 24 conferences. We are witnessing the experiments — the conferences — that will help us understand the practices that work well.

The EC is grateful to our volunteers, and our colleagues at the ACM — they are the reason that we can say that our community is in position to remain strong both in terms of budgets, and in terms of our ability to continue to the scientific exchange, even in these trying times. Thank you volunteers, and thank you ACM colleagues.

How is the financial situation of SIGCHI with so many conference cancellations?

SIGCHI maintains a minimum balance in the budget which is a proportion of our annual expenses. The purpose of this balance is to act as a buffer should adverse events happen. So far, SIGCHI balance seems to be sufficient to take care of our losses. Even so, the financial impact of COVID-19 might turn out to be worse than what we know so far. So we need to be careful. We are reworking our FY21 budget and monitoring the financial situation.

To minimize our exposure, future conferences are either going virtual or are planned as hybrid events. Conferences and the EC are reworking their budgets and funding models with the aim of minimising losses and maximising participation. Yet, given the expenses already incurred, and contractual agreements already in place, and the ongoing uncertainty, some losses might be unavoidable. We know some numbers already, but it is too early to know what the overall impact will be in FY21. Meanwhile, we are making prudent decisions in anticipation and making provisions to cover losses in the reworked FY21 SIGCHI budget.

How does this year’s canceling affect SIGCHI’s financial situation?

Future conferences are either going virtual or being planned as hybrid events. Conferences are reworking their budgets with the help of VP Conferences (Andrew Kun) and the President (Helena Mentis)in order to minimise losses. Yet, given the uncertainty, expenses already incurred, and contractual agreements already in place, some losses are unavoidable. We know how much some of these losses might be. We are reviewing these on an ongoing basis as more information becomes available. We are making provisions to cover these losses in the reworked FY21 budget.

How are we going to make the finances work if we have to plan for much fewer face-to-face events in the next couple of years? How do we make sure we don’t further push people with scarce resources out of the community as we tackle the finance question?

SIGCHI is required by the ACM to maintain a fund balance specifically so that we are not faced with such staggering losses that are then put on the community to cover. The SIGCHI EC is committed to not put further costs on our community members. If anything, the costs of attending virtual events are admittedly lower than of attending physical ones, since registration costs are reduced and the cost of travel is saved. As a community, we could certainly capitalize on this. For example, for many members of our community who reside in the Global South, resources for attending conferences are constrained, which makes virtual events more attractive. The present situation gives us an opportunity to reach many community members who were unable to attend face-to-face events due to scarcity of resources. We intend to make information about these events and similar community initiatives more public, moving forward, which should help. Please note that our travel award programs may have been impacted in the short run due to COVID-imposed travel restrictions, but we intend to start them back up soon, albeit more cautiously.

Virtual conferencing and support model

Most, if not all, of our 2020 conferences are moving online. This model might even remain for 2021, at least for some of our conferences. The EC is working to support conferences both in terms of how the conference can be successfully run online, as well as how our community finances can remain sustainable.

The SIGCHI EC is working with conference leadership to establish new guidelines and practices around virtual meetings, drawing from the report of the ACM’s Task Force . Part of this process will involve considering new models that are entirely virtual, or are hybrid-presence with both physical and virtual components. Individual conferences are pioneering new approaches, and we will be working with the larger SIGCHI Community on gathering these experiences of hosting and attending virtual events, as well as innovating new approaches for supporting virtual meetings.

The EC also voted to establish a new budget policy regarding virtual conferences. First, the EC affirmed its commitment not to hold individual conferences responsible for venue and food cancellation fees that are due to the COVID-19 crisis. These will be covered by SIGCHI. Second, the EC adjusted the return requirement — while for physical conferences this will continue to be 10% of planned spending, for virtual or mixed (physical/virtual) events it will be the return from the last approved physical event. By maintaining the level of return from conferences to SIGCHI, our community will be able to maintain the support from the SIG which includes covering PCS, CVENT, QOALA, the work of the video team, getting papers into the DL, receiving support in running conference finances by the ACM, etc.

Reviewing Quality

What steps are being taken to improve academic integrity and equity at the conference, particularly with respect to reviews? To give some context: Review criteria stated as “must have” or “important” on the website are not followed (e.g., submission size limits, move towards open science/supplementary materials), and conferences like CSCW, ISS have moved towards fully “refereed “publications, whereas CHI is only “formally reviewed” — our flagship conference should strive for the highest quality of review (https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/pre-publication-evaluation). Similarly, what tools are being provided to PCs/SCs/ACs to look at equity in the review process? Are some groups being disadvantaged in the review process? You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and equity should be a priority at CHI.

Ensuring a high quality in reviewing is a main priority for the CHI Steering Committee (SC), and the scale of CHI reviewing makes the need for centralized efforts in maintaining quality essential. First, for CHI 2021, the publication process is changing, and before CHI 2022, we will have an idea of how much time we gain from this new publishing model. The CHI Steering Committee is working with the 2022 team to determine how to best use this gained time for ensuring quality in our review process. Second, the CHI SC is considering the subcommittee structure of reviewing. Subcommittees were needed because of the growth in CHI submissions, but are also problematic in maintaining consistent standards across the conference as a whole–particularly when different subdomains use different methods with different definitions of rigour. After 10 years, it is time to revisit the subcommittees to determine if there is a better structure that we can adopt moving forward (with anticipated changes no earlier than CHI 2022). Third, the SC has a new Data Chair, whose job it is to gather data around conference review in an ethical and GDPR-compliant fashion, so that we can measure, and then address, potential inequities in review. Finally, to gather input from the leadership of the entire SIGCHI family of conferences, the SIGCHI Summit was planned for summer 2020 (summit.acm.org), which was to be a three-day event that invited the community to work together to ensure the highest standards in the creation, review, and dissemination of content over the SIGCHI family of conferences. Unfortunately, it was postponed due to COVID-19, but has been rescheduled to summer 2021. Visit the summit site to get an idea of the challenges that we know face us in ensuring equity in reviewing across the variety of methods and domains.

As a reviewer and an AC, my biggest concern is what could be done to improve the peer review system. There are several factors I can think of that are jeopardizing the review quality. (1) not enough people are signing up for review. There are many reasons behind this, like the complex interface of PCS 2.0 for potential reviewers to locate a specific conference for review. Perhaps as some conferences move to a journal mode, people who sign up for the first round think they have automatically signed up for the second round of reviewing. (2) many reviewers and even ACs have their matching score as -1, which I assume is because they have not uploaded their sample papers into PCS 2.0, another design failure of PCS 2.0.

Answer to part 1) relating to reviewer pool. We recognise that we are limited in our ability to widen our reviewer pool; there are an increasing number of papers being submitted, but a reviewer community that is growing more slowly than this. We have worked on adapting the reviewing process to be better able to take account of this (eg. changes at CHI over the last few years involving a streamlining of reviewers and ACs), but this may only become a stopgap solution as paper numbers continue to rise. However, several initiatives are taking place in this space. For example, the Volunteer Development Committee are collecting data from the volunteer pool so that we are more able to provide support to volunteers that are currently not engaged in, or are unable to contribute to the volunteering process (the large part of this being reviewing) through more inclusive policies and technological solutions. We are also working with non-archival venue chairs to pull in expertise from these venues more effectively into papers reviewing processes. For example, the CHI Late-Breaking Works programme has been used as a platform developing new reviewers and ACs, and this has been extended by the chairs more explicitly to identify excellent candidates to pull into the full papers programme.

In response to (2): PCS uses the Toronto Paper Matching Algorithm (Charlin & Zemel) and generates a match score ≥ 0 if the reviewers have uploaded their sample PDFs. If a reviewer has not uploaded sample PDFs, a score of -1 is displayed. Not quite a design failure; the matching only works when reviewers also do their bit by uploading papers. Please upload papers :-).

Equity and Justice

The “Critical Race Theory for HCI” paper presents some interesting challenges for the organization. How will you respond?

Race and ethnicity are crucial topics for the field of HCI to engage with, and this award-winning CHI 2020 paper offers a critical effort in this direction. This is a great step forward for the field, and more such are needed. The paper advocates for measures to be taken by the SIGCHI community, including commitments to identify and recruit minority students and junior scholars, ensuring race is not overlooked in our discussion of diversity, making sure issues of race and racism are raised regularly to the broader SIGCHI community beyond Diversity & Inclusion lunches and/or events at our conferences, diversifying geographic representation of where our professional events are held to be more racially diverse, and others.

The SIGCHI EC wholeheartedly agrees with the authors of the paper when they write that “race and racism impact all areas of HCI and talking about this will benefit everyone.” The SIGCHI EC is taking steps, along with the community members, to position HCI research and practice to contribute to solutions. Please also see our statement from a few weeks ago on this subject.

There have been a few efforts to move this conversation forward, such as the CHI 2020 workshop titled “Engaging in Race in HCI” that just took place virtually and was supported by the SIGCHI Development Fund. We have also established SIGCHI CARES to address harassment and discrimination issues at SIGCHI’s family of conferences and other related professional events. SIGCHI’s sponsored and in-cooperation conferences outside of CHI have been reaching around the world and in 2019 SIGCHI created the Global Community Development for Conferences policy. Additionally, we are analyzing the data from our diversity and inclusion survey, and will soon be able to focus our efforts in this area in a more sustained and systematic manner. All of these are but our initial and ongoing efforts, and we welcome suggestions from the community so we can collectively do more together. This is one significant motivation for our upcoming virtual townhalls, which will be announced shortly. Please look for updates on www.medium.com/sigchi.

In closing, we would like to acknowledge that a lot of work still needs to be done on addressing other minority voices in our community as well. Even race, comprehensively discussed in this paper, shows up differently when seen outside of the US. SIGCHI Community Support initiatives are committed to supporting diversity and inclusion globally as well, and attending to different dimensions of marginality, including cultural differences, social roles, sexual orientation and gender identity, structural positions, geographic marginality, physical/psychological marginality, as well as epistemic marginality. Efforts are underway to dedicate more resources along these margins as well, and to be as inclusive as possible in what we do. Please stay tuned for more on this front!

Given the conference dates for CHI 2021, those HCI researchers who celebrate Eid al-Fitr will be forced to choose between attending the conference during the last days of Ramadan and celebrating the Eid with their family and loved ones. I understand setting the dates isn’t easy, but CHI will be scheduled to take place during Ramadan for the third time in a row (after CHI 2019 and CHI 2020). Is it possible to not hold CHI during Ramadan and take into consideration Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha when setting the dates?

For CHI 2021, the conference ends on the eve of Eid al-Fitr. Just to put this in context, it is like ending a conference on Christmas Eve. Just as it wouldn’t be fair to expect those HCI researchers celebrating Christmas to travel overseas and miss the Christmas day, so too would it do the same to HCI researchers celebrating Eid al-Fitr. Also, during Ramadan, those who observe it fast from pre-dawn to sunset, and view it as an opportunity for self-reflection and spiritual improvement. Therefore, most of them would rather not have a CHI scheduled during Ramadan.

The dates of Ramadan change every year based on the lunar system, which may make it more challenging to take into consideration. I’d be happy to provide more guidance on the changing dates for the upcoming years, with the hope of them being taken into consideration when scheduling future conferences.

I understand nothing will change for CHI 2021. I just want to make sure the committee is aware that some HCI researchers will be forced to choose between their careers and religious observances when making a decision as to whether to attend CHI 2021, which is scheduled to take place during the last days of Ramadan and end on the eve of one of the two major Islamic holidays.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

For CHI 2021-2023, the conference will overlap with both Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr. When soliciting sites for CHI to be held, we approach many (6–12) cities for bids and after a long and complex process, usually end up with only one or two viable options, each on a single set of dates. The site selection process is conducted 4 years in advance of the conference, and we are limited by not starting earlier (as large venues are already booked), but starting earlier would mean less flexibility in changing the nature of the conference as we select sites based on projections of current CHI schedules (e.g., workshops on the weekend, parallel paper sessions). There has been no consideration of any religious or national holidays in CHI site selection in the past, but having seen the issue with Ramadan, we have added this to the requirements moving forward. Starting for 2024, religious and national holidays will be considered in the site selection process. We are sorry that this overlap is in place for already selected dates and will work to ensure that this changes moving forward.

The CHI General Chairs (GCs) and Technical Program Chairs (TPCs) from 2021 through 2023 have been notified about Ramadan and Eid-al-Fitr and will be working with members of our community to accommodate as best as possible. This might involve special events at the conference, reserved spaces for prayer, ensuring food options, and perhaps even scheduling presentations to accommodate. Feel free to reach out to the chairs to volunteer your assistance. As a reminder, the General Chairs for each CHI do not have a choice in the timing or location of the conference they run.

In terms of paper deadlines, it is in the process already to ensure that there is no overlap with major religious or national holidays, and the chairs and SC try to accommodate this as best as possible. Dates have been shifted in the past when conflicts have been identified, and we intend to continue this process.

SIGCHI CARES was not ready for CHI 2020. Why is that the case when it was announced in 2019? Has SIGCHI CARES been put in place for any SIGCHI conference or in fact does SIGCHI NOT-CARE?

Please read more about SIGCHI CARES here. It has, in fact, been ready since early April 2020. We had planned to announce this to the broader SIGCHI community at CHI 2020. Indeed, SIGCHI CARES.

Shaowen Bardzell, Chair of SIGCHI CARES, has been working with Andrew Kun, Interim Vice-President for Conferences, about ways the SIGCHI CARES committee can help those who experience discrimination and/or harassment at our professional events. We are working with conference steering committees and informing all conference chairs about SIGCHI CARES and are encouraging the chairs to include a slide about CARES in their opening plenary. SIGCHI CARES is here for our community, regardless of whether our conferences are in-person or virtual, given the pandemic.

How does the Chi community work toward fostering a diversity of perspectives, while striving for inclusion at a global scale? Empathy for a potential witness/victim might be a start…

There are many steps that the SIGCHI community is actively taking to promote inclusion efforts on several fronts, and at a global scale. Given the strategic initiatives listed on our website , the SIGCHI community support funds have been dedicated towards supporting individuals and groups located across the world to engage more of our community members in workshops, summer schools, etc., especially members who may otherwise not have access to funds to travel to the bigger SIGCHI conferences. With regards to the latter, travel awards through the SIGCHI Student Travel Grants, the Gary Marsden Fund, and the Early Career Mentorship Fund have been instituted as a form of support; we are redesigning our travel awards to consolidate these funds. With the recent turn to virtual, we hope that information about HCI resources will be more widely accessible to our global community, and we plan to facilitate this through our “Voices of SIGCHI” section of the SIGCHI Medium publication as well. Indeed, much more could be done, and we welcome additional suggestions you might have; please email them to sigchi-dev-fund@acm.org.

With regards to acting with empathy for a potential witness/victim as you mention, we have taken a number of steps to support inclusion. We have begun establishing the SIGCHI Cares Program. And we have more fully integrated D&I work in CHI conferences to continue to support conference-specific programs.

What steps have been taken to making SIGCHI and careers in Human Computer Interaction more accessible to students in developing countries?

Making SIGCHI more globally inclusive is absolutely a priority for the organization, as apparent from the strategic initiatives that were created to support both local and global sub-communities in HCI. No doubt that we could be doing much more! However, at present the SIGCHI Student Travel Grants, the Gary Marsden fund, and the Early Career Mentorship Fund are all actively supporting students and early career professionals from the Global South. We did pause one cycle of these to account for the costs incurred due to COVID-19, but will be starting them up again in the summer, albeit cautiously. In addition, events supported by the Asia Development Committee and the SIGCHI Development Fund, as well as individual chapters located across the Global South, are frequently targeted towards students and developing their research and/or practice careers within HCI. There is more that could be achieved in other parts of the world, such as Latin America and Africa, and we have been slowed down on our activity here by COVID-19 again, but will still be moving forward. On the plus side, with the recent turn to virtual, we hope that students everywhere are better and more easily able to participate in HCI events. We are also working on making global initiatives more public by writing about them on our SIGCHI Medium publication, and community inputs are welcome. That said, there is certainly more that we could be doing, and if you have any suggestions you’d like to add, please send them to us at sigchi-dev-fund@acm.org.

What will CHI do to avoid weekend PC meetings and be more family friendly?

PC meetings have been changing at CHI over the last few years. CHI 2018 held the last in-person meeting in December 2017 (with 6 virtual subcommittees), and went entirely virtual for ACs for 2019 and 2020. For 2021, the entire meeting will likely be virtual. For CHI 2022, there will be further changes, as the new ACM publication pipeline generates time in our review cycle that we will determine how to best support quality in review. PC meetings will continue to evolve. In terms of weekends versus weekdays, the CHI SC supports a balance as weekdays are disruptive to our paid work, whereas weekends are disruptive to our personal time. There is no single answer to best supporting family-friendly meetings. Many members of our community with caregiving responsibilities prefer weekends, as they may have a partner or support system in place to help with caregiving on the weekend. Other members prefer weekdays for the same reason, and because childcare is generally available during weekdays. We, as a community, are committed to supporting families and people with caregiving responsibilities, and also respecting boundaries that people set for their own work-life balance. There is no single solution that works for all people, but ensuring that we respect and try to accommodate a diversity of perspectives is our goal.

In the interest of full transparency, what should you do if you believe that a foreign actor tried to poison you while attending a sigchi conference?

Poisoning or attempted poisoning is violence which should be reported to the local law enforcement. CHI 2021, for example, has a web page with information in case of emergencies. The CHI 2021 Policy Against Discrimination and Harassment notes that safety is paramount, so if someone has committed or is threatening violence please contact the Japanese police.

CHI and SIGCHI structures and processes

Can we develop a new type of SIGCHI workshop that is entirely virtual? These workshops would have a conference “brand” (and a conference review-process), but could be scheduled at times of mutual convenience that would not have to coincide with a physical conference. They could experiment with flexibility afforded by their virtual nature — e.g., accommodating different timezones by holding shorter sessions over a series of days (similar to some of our virtual PC meetings).

Over time, we would be able to learn how to improve and enhance virtual events, feeding forward to configurations of {new work-practices, new designs, and new technologies} for improving virtual meetings.

If people like this idea, I would like to work on it with others. Thanks

The short answer is yes. In fact, just before the current crisis the EC designated a small budget for exploring how we can expand the reach of our conferences to a wider audience by employing online tools. Of course in the current situation most, if not all, of our conferences will go online at least in 2020, possibly longer. This means that there are multiple experiments going on to assess how best to create ways to exchange scientific information in our community using online tools. We are actively learning from these experiences and we will then apply them to work on suggestions such as this — how to create virtual online events even when physical meetings become possible again. Look out also for a call for proposals for innovative ideas around organizing virtual events that could be supported by the SIGCHI Development Fund, in July.

How is SIGCHI reaching out to practitioners in industry, or partnering with organizations who are focused on practitioners?

‘Practitioners’ form a very wide set of members with a hugely varied set of expertise and backgrounds, as well as very different levels of institutional support from their employers for engagement with SIGCHI activities. Of those that declare their employment status, practitioners account for 11.8% of SIGCHI memberships — a relatively small, but significant number, and this should help place the level of practitioner involvement within SIGCHI in some context. With this in mind, although practitioner participation in events and volunteering is not as high as academic and industrial researcher participation, we do have significant numbers of practitioners involved and actively participating across SIGCHI. Of course, we need to do more in this respect and we have an active research exercise to learn about our membership’s needs around SIGCHI volunteering (you can help out by completing this survey). Our research activities identify practitioners as a unique membership group and will examine the concerns, barriers, motivations and possible solutions to involving this group within SIGCHI. The SIGCHI Development Fund (SDF) events have also promoted participation of practitioners. All SIGCHI members are eligible to apply for funding from the SDF in order to engage the broader HCI communities in events, activities, or projects that address key needs, explicitly identifying practitioners as one of its target groups.

Locally-led alternative events to CHI 2020 have been a great way to explore a range of virtual organizing events. (1) Is there any way SIGCHI is keeping track/collecting feedback from these events, when thinking about planning for future events that may be wholly or partially virtual (for a variety of reasons, including Covid 19)? (2) As a participant in some of these alternative CHI 2020 events, it strikes me that a benefit of co-location is that it gets rid of the timezone barrier, particularly when interacting with collaborators or colleagues from the other side of the globe! Are there thoughts to how SIGCHI can help maintain a healthy international community in the age of Coronavirus, when it may be difficult for the community to physically co-locate?

It is true that virtual events are challenging to organize for this reason. However, there are several advantages to holding these events virtually as well, in terms of becoming more accessible to the global community, particularly to those who may not have resources to travel, or may wish to cut down on their travel for sustainability reasons. In addition, many of these events have been adapted such that they are held in shorter windows and possibly across multiple days. Some have been shortened to provide more effective engagement while online (e.g., the CHI 2020 doctoral consortium that was held in two slots to accommodate separate groups of students and volunteers). While we do not prefer having to organize our events without being able to accommodate face-to-face interaction, we are all trying to find good (and better) answers for how we can maintain a cohesive community. To this end, the SIGCHI community, through its 24 conferences, is conducting multiple experiments in running online conferences. We are also going to publicize a call for proposals for organizing new kinds of (possibly hybrid) virtual events. We will be sharing what we learn with the community via our blog and Medium publication. Stay tuned!

From the local chapter SIGCHI activities, there have been tremendous amounts of activities initiated and organized by our chapter leaders virtually. Chapter leaders meet and communicate on a daily basis to ensure that we can support our community. New connections, collaborations across chapters have been built. At SIGCHI Chapter level, we are in the process of building our social media presence so not only the leaders but also the larger community members are aware of what is going on locally and easily join the activities if they are interested. We will also start to send our SIGCHI Local Chapter newsletter to share all of our activities across regions (Asia, Pacific, LatAm, Europe, US, Middle East) and put any shareable resources produced from the activities online. If you are interested to be part of the SIGCHI Local Chapters, please reach us out.

When Hawaii again?

CHI site selection occurs 4 years prior to the conference, and follows a rotation of East Coast North America, Europe, West Coast North America, Asia, Wildcard. The soonest we could consider returning to Hawaii is in 2025 as our wildcard year. There are some advantages to returning, as much effort was put into planning an event that did not take place; however, there are also many considerations to take into account when choosing locations, and the CHI SC may instead prioritize outreach to other communities (e.g., Latin America, Africa, South Asia) in choosing a location for 2025.

Given the opportunities and challenges posed by the present crisis, will SIGCHI evolve to become a year-round event?

The CHI conference will continue to evolve, and the present crisis may accelerate some changes. There will be aspects of the CHI conference that will be more accessible year round (e.g., paper presentation videos) and also virtually; however, we do not anticipate that CHI will become a regionalized event (multiple CHIs held simultaneously around the world) or a year-round event. The SIGCHI family of conferences do already span the year, and will likely continue to innovate new models of disseminating research to our community and connecting our members to one another for discussion and networking.

Publications

When does SIGCHI move to support TRUE OPEN ACCESS? It’s embarrassing, not to mention disrespectful toward our stakeholders, that our papers are still paywalled. Yes, you can put them in repo, but since not all do that, it’s not working. SIGCHI has been kicking the can down the road for too many years.

This question has come up a number of times in Town Hall questions, and has been increasingly important in our community in recent years. However, the questions of “why isn’t everything open” or “when will everything be open” are not productive because we do not know anyone who opposes open access or thinks it isn’t the direction we should be moving.

A more productive question is “what do we need to change to make open access possible?” Because we do need to change, as authors, as volunteers, as readers, as staff, and as an organisation. We may need to change our practices and expectations if we want to reduce the costs of publication, our organisation needs to change its economic model and stable revenue streams, our community may need to change the way we experience publications at conferences.

Moving to open access requires identifying new revenues streams and reducing costs because the publication services provided by a non-profit organisation have material costs. The recent article published by the ACM gives an in-depth view of the costs of publication. Given this detailed overview of the expenses, we can have better informed discussions about the costs of publication and the relative value that different publication services provide. For example, developing and enforcing standard metadata makes papers more discoverable, but comes at significant cost in infrastructure and staff to support these tasks. As we explore new models that would support open access, we also need to identify revenue streams that would produce a standard of publication appropriate to our community standards.

As a non-profit organisation, ACM does not profit from paywalled content but uses these funds to support publications and the overheads the publications programme. As we explore open access models, change will come slowly as the organisation redefines revenue and ensure longterm sustainability.

Transition to Open Access, particularly important in light of COVID-19

There are a few good resources on the current barriers to moving toward universal open access. ACM has produced an incredibly transparent accounting of the costs of publications, and SIGCHI has done analysis of our own publication spending and comparison to how other scholarly societies and non-profit organisations structure their finances.

Although ACM has temporarily made the Digital Library open access in response to COVID-19, this is not a sustainable solution in the long term. As a community, we need to reflect on the cost-value tradeoffs of different publications expenses and explore new publication finance models. This is not something that can happen overnight, and the long-term sustainability of our community and our society means change may be slow.

Given the current situation, should CHI be moving to a journal model now?

Independent of the current situation, we are looking at moving CHI to a journal model. There will be plans for this that will be piloted at CHI 2022.