We are excited to announce the leadership team (General Chairs and Technical Program Chairs) for CHI20204, introduce you to the team, and also provide some background of the 2021 Open Call process.
The CHI2024 Leadership Team
The General Chairs (GCs) for CHI2024 are Joaquim Jorge and Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller.
Collectively they bring extensive experience to the role and represent dimensions of diversity in terms of geography and research areas. Joaquim is from Lisbon, Portugal, the first time CHI has had a general chair from Portugal. He has a long history of senior service roles and conference organisation in HCI, Graphics and VR-related areas, including as General Chair of ACM IUI 2012 and ISS 2020, and IEEE VR 2021 and 2022. Floyd is from Melbourne, Australia, and comes from the research area of digital play, also with significant prior experience in conference organisation, such as CHI PLAY’18 and DIS’22. CHI2024 will also benefit from Floyd’s knowledge of the local Hawaii context (knowledge gained from working as GC for CHI2020 before it was cancelled due to COVID-19). Having been a member of the CHI Steering Committee since 2019, Floyd also brings expertise in the unique considerations that organising a CHI conference requires.
The Technical Program Chairs (TPCs) for CHI2024 are Julie R. Williamson and Corina Sas. Again, collectively they bring a great deal of experience and enthusiasm to the role. Julie’s experience in the CHI conference as Papers Chair, Interactivity Chair, and Subcommittee Chair (UUX), as SIGCHI VP for Publications, and her work on the ACM Publications Board and Digital Library Board will be invaluable in this role. Corina also brings substantial CHI and SIGCHI conference experience in diverse technical program chair roles, including various Associate Chair and Subcommittee chair roles, as well as conference co-chair for Creativity and Cognition and British HCI among others.
The GCs and TPCs jointly lead on the main organisational aspects for CHI. The GCs oversee the conference in general and are responsible for all the non-technical-program aspects of the event, especially around managing the budget and setting the overall direction of the conference through putting in place relevant organisational track chairs. The TPCs are responsible for all aspects of the technical program, from establishing the various technical track chairs, to overseeing the conference program and the publications process.
We thank all of them for their willingness to take on these substantial service roles for the CHI Community. We are grateful to Joaquim and Floyd for responding to the Open Call and volunteering to step up to this substantial service role as CHI2024 GCs (see below). We are also grateful to Julie and Corina for agreeing to take on the TPC roles.
In line with the long-standing commitment of the CHI conference series to foregrounding diversity across our leadership roles, the CHI2024 leadership team are committed to establishing a diverse organisational committee for the CHI2024 conference and are working hard towards this. We wish them all the best and trust that the community will recognise and support them in their work.
The CHI2024 selection process
For CHI2024, this is the first time the CHI Steering Committee (SC) had an Open Call for CHI General Chairs and TPCs. This was to be in line with the 2019 SIGCHI EC Policy on ‘Open Calls for Volunteering Positions: ACM SIGCHI Policy Guidance’.
Towards this, the SC formed a Selection Committee, inviting past General Chairs and Technical Program Chairs (TPCs) from 2019-2021. Nine people agreed to help out (see the SC post for details). The main work of the committee was to develop the Open Call text, help identify a diverse pool of potential candidates and directly encourage people to apply – at least 42 people from all corners of the globe were contacted. We also promoted the call widely via SIGCHI mailing lists, SIGCHI Medium post, a CHI SC blog post, and social media posts.
We received four expressions of interest (EoI) by the 16 July 2021 deadline, three for GC, and one for TPC or GC. This last person, Per Ola Kristensson, then accepted a TPC role for CHI2023. The remaining three were approached to put together a GC team. During the process, one volunteer withdrew due to changing career circumstances. The remaining two (Joaquim and Floyd) were happy to work together as a team, and this proposal was taken forward to the SC.
After internal deliberation, the SC approved the proposal of Joaquim and Floyd as General Chairs, reflecting the result from the Open Call, and based on a clear commitment for a diverse broader leadership team. This proposal was then taken to the EC by the SC chair. Again, after much internal deliberation, the EC approved this proposal on 22 March 2022.
Following this conditional approval of the GCs, the SC worked together with the GC-elects to identify potential TPCs who brought significant experience and expertise to the role. As no further volunteers were identified from the open call, we sought community members who had served in complementary roles (e.g., paper chairs, TOCHI editors, TPCs for other SIGCHI conferences, publications chairs, interactivity chairs) in recent years, approaching potential volunteers one at a time. As per above we now have a very strong leadership team to move forward with organising CHI2024 in service of our community.
Moving forward, both the SC and the EC agreed to review the selection process and use the ‘lessons learnt’ to consider how future CHI chair recruitment and selection can be conducted smoothly and fruitfully, in alignment with our shared values around diversity and inclusivity, and in recognition of the experience needed to manage the scale and complexity of the CHI conference.