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Chapter Leaders Workshop Summary

This email captures the logistical information discussed during the Virtual Chapter Leaders Workshop, held Saturday, June 19, 2021. 

Make sure you don't miss the Conference Events every Chapter can take part in at the end of this email!

1. The overall agenda can be found in this document. 

   1. A large portion of the workshop was dedicated to inter-chapter networking, demonstrations of technology, and small group problem-solving discussions that won’t be reproduced here.

2. Announcements

   1. We made sure to mention at the beginning of the meeting that many chapter leaders who wanted to attend were unable to, especially as we were scheduled against the Juneteenth and Father’s Day holidays in the US. We will try to avoid these holidays if we do this again, but unfortunately could not change the date for this year to accommodate more participants.

   2. We held an art contest this year - anyone who wanted to participate was asked to create something during the meeting, either digitally or physically, and post it in the #2021artcontest slack channel. The theme was “I am inspired by…” and you can still check out the submissions! (If you are not on slack, you can join here.) Congratulations again to Christian Sanchez from the Drexel University chapter for his victory!

3. Visiting ACM SIGGRAPH volunteers

   1. Mona Kasra, who is an Executive Committee Director-At-Large, stopped by to talk about the state of the ACM SIGGRAPH organization, and to thank chapters for being a vital part of the organization. She encouraged anyone with thoughts or questions to reach out to her at mona.siggraph@gmail.com.

   2. Mikki Rose, who was the SIGGRAPH North America 2019 conference chair, is currently on the Conference Advisory Group (CAG), and she stopped by to talk about volunteering for the conferences and give us a sneak peek at some of the exciting stuff happening at the SIGGRAPH North America 2021 (virtual) conference. She would love to hear from you at mikki_rose@siggraph.org.

      1. Note if you would like conference promotional materials, you can find those at this link.

      2. Note if you would like to purchase conference swag, it is all being sold a la carte on Zazzle here.

   3. Muunuu Nandigjav, who is the SIGGRAPH North American 2022 conference chair, came to let us know how excited she is for next year’s conference, which will hopefully return to an in-person or hybrid event in Vancouver. If you have questions about next year’s conference, you should email her at chair-s2022@siggraph.org.

   4. Bonnie Mitchell, who was with us for the whole workshop as the faculty advisor for the Bowling Green State University chapter, also took a moment to speak about an incredible website archive of computer graphics history that the History Committee is collecting for ACM SIGGRAPH’s upcoming 50th anniversary. If you’d like to hear more, or contribute to its development, you should let her know at bonniem@bgsu.edu.

4. Information Dump

   1. “State of the Organization”: 

      1. AJ presented this slideshow describing the current state of the ACM SIGGRAPH organization, and what he learned from participating in two all-hands Executive Committee strategic workshops. 

      2. NOTE: The questions asked in the slideshow, such as “What could make membership more appealing?”, are questions to YOU, the chapter leaders of the organization. We would love your feedback!

   2. Slack continues to be a great place to organize events across chapters, to speak directly with the chapters committee, and to see a stream of the most recent information from ACM and ACM SIGGRAPH. Please make sure your current leaders sign up at this link.

   3. We welcomed Brenda Romero who is the new Chapters Committee liaison to chapters in South America, Europe, and Africa. Brenda would like to start building stronger community links among these chapters, and helping them to learn from each other. She is also hoping to help establish more chapters. If you have thoughts or would like to work with her, please reach out to her on Slack or at chapters-latam@acmsiggraph.org (for Latin America) or chapters-emea@acmsiggraph.org (for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa).

   4. We announced a new initiative to recognize and celebrate our student chapters by offering complimentary ACM and ACM SIGGRAPH memberships to student chapter leaders and their faculty advisors. These are the memberships that are required for chapters to be active. We hope this will help student chapters to build their leadership teams without the obstacle of a financial burden, and we also hope that this will lead to greater success in growing the organization’s sphere of engagement which can ultimately lead to more paid membership in the future. If this goes well, we may be able to justify the same benefit for professional chapters in the future. The end of AJ’s slideshow has a couple screen captures that show how this will look in ACM’s chapters administration database - and how it is currently implemented for SIGCHI.

   5. Chapter grants continue to be available - either in $200 amounts to keep, or in low-stakes $1000 loans that we hope will be mostly repaid to the loan fund. You can learn more in Natasha’s slideshow.

      1. NOTE: Although the traveling Computer Animation Festival has historically been free to chapters, last year’s and this year’s festivals are hosted through a third party service that charges a fee per-viewer. We are able to offer $200-worth of support to chapters to view the festival at $2.50 per person, but you should reach out directly to the Chapters Committee to request this, rather than using the grant application process. Because of a complex chain of dependencies with the vendor, we are requiring chapters who apply for this to provide a final headcount of seats they intend to fill 4 weeks in advance of their event.

   6. Since January, the Chapters Committee has dedicated a lot of time and effort to researching and designing a system for the entire ACM SIGGRAPH organization to use for communication across its many communities. This responsibility was given to the Chapters Committee because of our history of community building for regional affinity groups (aka chapters), but we hope to expand these Online Communities to interest-driven affinity groups (e.g. a digital fabrication community) and identity-driven affinity groups (e.g. women in computer graphics). The recommendation we have made includes a Discord server for new communities, a mostly-static “map” on the ACM SIGGRAPH website that directs visitors to the various existing communities that are already out there, and a mobile app that allows members to connect with friends year-round. This platform will be opened to all chapter members at some point, which will make it unique from the Slack where only chapter leaders are able to join.

5. Conference Events

   1. Kerry shared an overview of the Chapters Fast Forward process, which will be the same as it was last year. You can see her presentation pre-recorded in this video. This is the document she is describing with instructions on how to create your chapter’s Fast Forward video. You can upload your recording using this link.

      1. For inspiration, you can visit the ACM SIGGRAPH Youtube account to see what last year’s Fast Forward videos looked like, in addition to the Fast Forward highlight reel we played during the conference.

   2. Benoit shared plans for the Chapters Party for this year’s virtual North American conference. The party events will be similar to last year, but with some expanded options based on the experience we all built together last year. You can learn more about participating in the Chapters Party process here.

      1. Like last year, hosting a party event will entitle a chapter to one free Enhanced Registration and one free Basic Registration. Note that this is only guaranteed for the first 10 chapters to sign up, but we will ask for more support from the organization if more chapters sign up.

   3. At the end of each session during the workshop, we experimented with two different types of party event. At the end of the first session, everyone gathered in an isometric world of 2D avatars called gather.town. At the end of the second session, we ran a “Zoom annotation Exquisite Corpse” group drawing event. You can see the images the group created below.

If you have any questions about content you missed during the workshop, please reach out to the Chapters Committee on Slack or via email at pscc@siggraph.org.

AJ Christensen, Professional and Student Chapters Committee Chair

About the Professional and Student Chapters Committee