SIGCAPH Annual Report
July 1998 - June 1999
Submitted by: Ephraim P. Glinert Chair
The past year was a relatively quiet one for SIGCAPH. Our membership figures and cash surplus have remained reasonably stable. Under the expert stewardship of editor Art Karshmer our sole publication, the SIG newsletter, appears on schedule three times a year and with high quality content which typically includes 1-2 research papers as well as sundry announcements and news of interest to our members. Bowden Wise continues to serve as the SIG webmaster.
With ASSETS'98, the 3rd International ACM/SIGCAPH Conference on Assistive Technologies, behind us, the main activity of the SIG leadership during the past year has focused on getting organized for ASSETS'00. Sadly, I must report that the pace of preparations to date has been unsatisfactory. The original plan was to hold the conference in the UK, just before or after INTERCHI'00 which will be taking place next spring in the Netherlands. But the volunteer General Chair for our conference, Helen Petrie (who is also currently the SIG Vice Chair), failed to complete the TMRF in a timely manner, never reported any progress regarding the preparations, and even stopped responding to my e-mail. Despite my heavy workload at the National Science Foundation, where I am currently a rotating Program Director, I could have found time to keep the conference planning on track. But I am concerned that SIGCAPH needs to achieve greater volunteer involvement from the community if it, and the ASSETS conference series, are to prove viable for the long term. I therefore determined to make an effort to enlist some "new blood" to lend a hand with ASSETS'00, even if the resulting delay in planning necessitates pushing back the conference date. Some time was lost through a false start, when a senior researcher and promising candidate for the position of conference General Chair decided in the end not to accept the job due to an upheaval in his personal life. I believe we may now at last have an important component of the required leadership in place, with Marilyn Mantei-Tremaine and Elliot Cole having agreed to serve (in whatever order) as the General and Program Chairs. However, I believe the team would be stronger, and the workload more tolerable, if Marilyn and Elliot were to jointly serve as Program Co-Chairs - in which case the General Chair slot remains vacant. I have some new ideas for filling this position, and hope that it still may be possible to schedule the conference for the late fall of 2000 on the east coast of the country, perhaps in the Philadelphia or Washington, DC, area.
