Communities: Call for Participation

Quick Facts

• Submission Deadline: 16 Jul 2010
• Notification: 20 Aug 2010
• Submission Format: 4-page extended abstract
• New Communities Selection Process: Juried, i.e., a community proposals will be reviewed and decided upon by a committee of HCI experts, rather than going through a full peer-review process.
• Communities
  • Design
  • Engineering
  • Management
  • User Experience

Message from the Communities Chair

Communities are a chance for SIGCHI members with a common area of interest to gather and advance their area through the CHI conference. If your emerging community has grown enough to where you can organize a significant body of work, and volunteers to ensure its quality, consider proposing a community within the conference. Communities are about moving an area of the field forward. CHI communities might address new areas of research and practice, new methodologies, emerging application areas, design innovations, management and organizational issues, HCI education, engineering and modeling, systems development, theory or other areas. Some will represent strategic areas for SIGCHI or the conference, and others will represent areas of interest within the larger SIGCHI community. Their influence may be felt through existing venues and may innovate in how the content is treated within the program. Communities emerging through the CHI conference may even spawn new, more specialized conferences in the future.

Arnie Lund, Microsoft

Contact: communities@chi2011.org

What are Communities?

The field of human-computer interaction is built on the premise of diversity, balance, collaboration and evolution. We believe that our strength lies in seeing problems from multiple viewpoints and in integrating expertise from multiple domains to find solutions as needs change and new technologies emerge.

In recent years, CHI has identified several major communities of practice: Design, User Experience, Engineering and Management. New communities will be formally represented in the conference as SIGCHI members gather and propose them. Each community comprises chairs and committees who are experts in the domain and who have had significant experience working within the greater CHI community, and will have the opportunity to innovate within the conference and influence the program to better satisfy the needs of the community.

CHI communities serve three major roles: (1) They are the primary entry points and guides for researchers and practitioners new to CHI. Each of the community pages describes the community, its personality, and provides guidance on its role within CHI. They help attendees and authors find ways to connect with the conference more effectively. (2) They are engaged across the submission venues, and are instrumental in creating the most interesting, diverse and informative program. In this role, they advise respective venue chairs on issues surrounding the culture and expectations of work in the domain and how to satisfy them. For several venues (e.g. Case Studies and Panels), authors may also choose the community or communities that they would like to review their paper. (3) They are responsible for driving innovative community-specific events and venues. 

Featured Communities

CHI has had a set of Core Communities that have persisted over several years including User Experience, Design, Engineering, and Management. The contributions to HCI from members of these Core Communities span HCI as a discipline; almost all HCI-oriented work involves the use of methods from each of the Core Communities.

For CHI 2011, we are adding the concept of Featured Communities. Featured Communities will tend to be more domain-oriented than the cross-cutting Core Communities. The goals of adding Featured Communities to CHI include providing an environment in which community members like yourself can incubate and grow your community, and and which can enhance the conference with a wider variety of contributions, participants, and innovation in how content is presented.

The Featured Communities at CHI 2011 include:

• Health
• Games and Entertainment
• Sustainability
• Child-computer Interaction

This set of Featured Communities was selected from proposals submitted to the CHI 2011 Communities Chair. The set of Featured Communities at CHI may change from year to year. Please help your community become self-sustaining by getting involved in organizing the community and its contributions to the CHI program.

In what ways will these Communities be featured at CHI? Core Communities and Featured Communities act very much alike at the conference, including the following contributions to the CHI technical program.

• Communities are featured on the conference call for submissions, on the conference web site, in the printed and electronic program and at the conference
• Each Community holds at least 1 SIG meeting
• Community chairs serve on the selection committee for Case Studies
• Community chairs are consulted as experts in their domain by other program selection committees (e.g., Papers, Notes, Works In Progress, and more) /li>
• Communities can propose an invited talk, hold a panel, or organize other unique forms of content (performances, competitions, etc.)
• Communities identify and publicize the talks and other technical program content that is particularly relevant to members of their community. "Community trails" will be listed on each community's web page, and hopefully through electronic versions of the program that are being created for the conference (e.g., TrailMaps, and smartphone apps).

Your ideas about how we can leverage this concept of Featured Communities more effectively through the conference both to benefit your community and to advance the success and effectiveness of CHI 2011 are definitely welcome!

Preparing and Submitting a Communities Proposal

The proposal must be submitted as a single PDF file by 16 July 2010 to Arnie Lund (communities@chi2011.org). The proposal must have the following distinct sections: 

• A proposal
• A description for the CHI 2011 website

The proposal should be in the CHI Extended Abstract format and the cover sheet can be in any format. All of these parts should be submitted in one combined file in PDF format.

Part 1. Proposal

The proposal is for the Communities review committee. It should be in the CHI Extended Abstract format and not exceed 4 pages. The proposal must describe the community of interest, offer evidence of the existence and estimated size of the community of interest, the approach that will be taken to stimulate content and identify volunteers to work on the program, propose unique approaches to the program, and the organizers' qualifications to lead the community. 

Part 2. Breif Description fo CHI Website

Provide a description for the community for the CHI 2011 website. Existing communities descriptions may serve as a model of length, structure and style.

Upon Acceptance of Your Community

Organizers will be notified of acceptance or rejection by 20 August 2010. Organizers of accepted communities will receive instructions on their responsibilities, and how to begin working with the Technical Program venues.

Responsibilities:

• Develop a community of interest, stimulate submissions to the conference, and engage the community in the reviewing process.
• Support content reviewing by working with content chairs and providing reviewers as appropriate.
• Work with the technical program committee to innovate in content types to better serve the needs of the community.
• Participate in program creation at the technical program meeting to ensure an appropriate balance of content.
• Provide tools for the community to ensure members are able to easily find the content most relevant to the community.
• Innovate in leveraging the conference to grow the community.