ET#1: Being Global on *MARCH 8 1630 GMT* (Zoom/Sli.do)
As the SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC) nears the end of its current term, we are putting together a series of community-facing roundtable sessions that we’re calling Equity Talks. These will aim to discuss and summarize a number of equity issues that shape the workings of the EC and the SIGCHI community at large, circling us back to our commitment to listen, reflect, act, and represent made in June 2020:
The task that lies before us is one of weaving equity, inclusion, and solidarity into each of our scholarly and professional activities, so that “diversity and inclusion” are not add-ons, but deeply integrated into our every practice, whether it involves conference processes, volunteering responsibilities, or global community support mechanisms.
The work of listening, reflecting, acting, and representing has certainly begun, as is apparent from SIGCHI president Helena Mentis’ end-of-year report, and we have learned that these processes must be interwoven and continuous. Thus, our upcoming Equity Talks will continue where our Ask-Me-Anything sessions (in August-December 2020) left off. These Talks will be semi-curated, semi-structured, hour-long roundtable discussions, aimed at advancing the conversation on many of the concerns that our community members have voiced. Our goal is as much to foster awareness around concerns on these issues as it is to summarize them so that the new EC might be assisted in taking these on.
The first of these — Being Global — will focus on the experiences and challenges in making up SIGCHI’s global identity, particularly of those from groups less represented in conferences such as CHI, awards, HCI activity, etc. We will pose the questions below to all participants:
- What are the big and small ways in SIGCHI’s everyday operations that its global identity surfaces (or struggles to surface)?
- What are lessons we have learned individually that might help different groups build HCI capacity better?
- What do we need to take us towards a truly global SIGCHI?
Some of us from the EC will be hosts, we are inviting you all as guest contributors to this discussion, and we will also invite more folks to participate.* Please publicize these sessions widely. We will share recordings (with captions) and summaries once the sessions are completed.
We will add more information to this schedule below as we go along:
- Being Global — March 8, 1630 GMT (in your time zone) Zoom/Sli.do
- Making SIGCHI Accessible — March 18, 1600 GMT (in your time zone) Zoom/Sli.do
- Reviewing & Mentorship — March 31, 2130 GMT (in your time zone) (TBD)
- Infrastructuring Equity — TBD
- Research, Industry, Practice, etc. — TBD
- Understanding Gender — TBD
- Understanding Race** — TBD
Read our Code of Conduct (courtesy Cale Passmore) and Accessibility requests for the audience (courtesy our ACs for Accessibility).
Join us! And we’d love to hear your thoughts!
Neha Kumar & Shaowen Bardzell (VPs at Large)
Adriana S. Vivacqua & Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy (ACs for Equity)
Stacy Branham & Soraia Prietch (ACs for Accessibility)
Theresa Tanenbaum (VP Publications)
On behalf of the SIGCHI Executive Committee
*We thank Cale Passmore and Miriam Sturdee for their help with moderating and documenting.
**We also thank Yolanda Rankin for organizing this session for/with us.
