Sigaccess fy’10 Annual Report

Special Projects

The memorandum of understanding with ResNet was signed in July 2009. Because SIGUCCS and ResNet are both organizations of people providing IT services in higher education, close cooperation makes sense. However, that commonality also means that both of us are suffering from the same economic forces that have depressed university support for travel and professional development. As a result, not all aspects of the cooperation envisaged in the memorandum of understanding have been implemented yet. We have, at least, had the opportunity to promote SIGUCCS at each of the past two ResNet annual conferences.

One of the hallmarks of SIGUCCS conferences has been the opportunity to interact with colleagues at other institutions who are facing the same issues and problems. We have long been interested in finding ways to continue that interaction between conferences. This year, we have initiated two means of doing so.

First, we have established an on-line community using Ning’s social networking service and linked its portal to our new web site. The community has so far attracted 100 members who have to varying degrees taken advantage of the ability to initiate discussions, create groups, contribute to blogs, and share photographs and other information.

Second, we began a series of webinars which we intend to continue on a quarterly basis. The first took place in January 2010. The second one was scheduled for April but postponed when the presenter fell ill. (The rescheduled webinar took place just last week.) Each attracted more than 70 registrants, and the feedback to date has been very positive. The topics covered so far have both been in the realm of staff development, but we expect that the webinars will range widely over the interests of SIGUCCS members. We are considering using the same medium for other purposes, including periodic open SIG meetings and an informational session about the board’s role prior to formulating a slate of candidates for the next election. We already use our webinar service for our monthly Board conference calls.

Issues

We are working on this problem on two fronts: marketing to attract more registrants—especially among what we suspect is still a relatively large group of higher education IT professionals who are not familiar with SIGUCCS—and judicious adjustments to conference budgets to achieve better financial results without reducing the value and appeal of the events. We renewed our subscription to a mailing list of IT directors and managers in higher education and are using it to let them know about our conferences, grants, and award programs. We have made small increases in our conference registration fees and are looking carefully for ways to cut conference expenses without reducing the essential value of the conference.

A related development, setting another challenge for ourselves, is the decision made last fall to change our conference schedule so that each year we offer a single conference that combines the content of the two existing meetings. As described in last year’s report, the motivation for this change was not primarily financial, but it should enable us to lower our conference costs. The challenge will be to preserve the audience (and its associated revenue), especially during the transition to the new conference schedule.

The first combined conference, named simply SIGUCCS 2011, will occur in November 2011 in San Diego. We have been fortunate to attract an energetic group of experienced volunteers to the conference committee. Planning for the new event compels us to re-think our old practices and to devise new practices that exploit the combined structure.

Maria de Graça C. Pimentel (Vice-Chair)

Simon Harper (Secretary/Treasurer)

Yeliz Yesilada (Information Director)

Darren Lunn (Newsletter Editor)

Claus Atzenbeck (Interviews Associate Editor)

• 
  ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng) 2009
  (held in September 2009 in Munich, Germany)
  
• 
  ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 2009
  (held in October 2009 in Hong Kong, China)
  
• 
  ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2010)
  (held February 2010 in New York City, USA)
  
• 
  ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2010
  (held June 2010 in Surfer’s Paradise, Australia)
  
• 
  ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT) 2010
  (held June 2010 in Toronto, Canada)
  
  
  

• 
  The Douglas C. Engelbart Best Paper Award for 2010 (HT 2010)
  “Hyperorders and Transclusion: Understanding Dimensional Hypertext”
  James Goulding, Tim Brailsford and Helen Ashman
  
• 
  The Theodor Holm Nelson Newcomer Award for 2010 (HT 2010)
  “iMapping – A Zooming User Interface Approach for Personal and Semantic Knowledge Management”
  Heiko Haller and Andreas Abecker
  
• 
  The Vannevar Bush Award for 2010 (JCDL 2010)
  “Transferring Structural Markup Across Translations Using Multilingual Alignment and Projection”
  

• 
  David Bamman, Alison Babeu, and Gregory Crane
  

• 
  SIGWEB has been giving complimentary SIGWEB memberships to attendees at our two 100% sponsored conferences (Hypertext and DocEng). The hope is that members will continue their memberships in years that they do not attend. More importantly, we hope that more of them will be willing to be volunteers. Predictably, first year retention has dropped from about 47% to 40%, but overall retention looks acceptable. The Executive Committee continues to monitor this initiative.
  
• 
  SIGWEB has restarted its newsletter. The primary distribution medium is the Internet, but a one-page color flyer containing abbreviated articles with URLs is mailed to all members. This is done in the belief that a physical document is easier to share and provides a tangible reminder of membership. Overall, we consider this effort a success and we are considering expanding the format to a four-page format (single 11x17 sheet, folded), provided that we can do so at reasonable cost.
  
• 
  SIGWEB has initiated a Student Travel Award program, modeled on those of SIGIR and SIGAPP, for its 100%-sponsored conferences. In 2009, about $10,000 was given for students presenting at Hypertext 2009 and DocEng 2009 ($5000 each). In 2010, about $17,000 in total will be given for Hypertext, JCDL, and DocEng. This is a way that SIGWEB can return some of its surpluses to the community and it is certainly popular with the participants.
  
• 
  SIGWEB has worked to strengthen its traditional flagship conference by broadening its scope to include Social Linking and Networking. The meeting saw a dramatic increase in attendance in 2009 (from 90 to 150), but this was somewhat illusory, because the host institute allowed for many complimentary registrations. Attendance in 2010 was solid at about 100, so the conference appears stable, but may not be growing.
  

Volunteer development has been another challenge for SIGWEB. It has become particularly acute as the SIG’s sponsorships have become more diffuse and our flagship conference (Hypertext) has seen falling attendance. Starting in FY 2008, SIGWEB formed a SIGWEB Advisory Committee that is a proper superset of the Executive Committee. This Advisory Committee discusses policy issues and plans for SIGWEB via an online group. Formal policy decisions continue to rest with the Executive Committee. The Advisory Committee’s membership includes representatives from each sponsored conference, past officers, past candidates for office, and others who are active in SIGWEB projects. The goals of the Advisory Committee are multiple. It broadens the pool of people who are discussing SIGWEB policy and activities and can be prepared to serve as officers in the future. It should strengthen the connection between SIGWEB and the conferences that it sponsors. Finally, it helps ensure that SIGWEB listens to its constituents.