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SIGDOC Program Review 2010. Brad Mehlenbacher SIGDOC Chair brad_m@unity.ncsu.edu www4.ncsu.edu/~brad_m March 8, 2010. Financial/Membership health of ACM SIGDOC. Healthy with a fund balance that has ranged between ~40K (500 members) and ~75K (211 members) since the mid 1990s
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SIGDOC Program Review 2010 Brad MehlenbacherSIGDOC Chair brad_m@unity.ncsu.edu www4.ncsu.edu/~brad_m March 8, 2010
Financial/Membership health of ACM SIGDOC • Healthy with a fund balance that has ranged between ~40K (500 members) and ~75K (211 members) since the mid 1990s • Fund balance increase since 2004 • Small surplus generated in all conferences since 2000 (<5K) • Expenses limited to conference organizer and board travel/expenses • Minor investment in 500 print brochures • Investigating delivering proceedings digitally at conferences • Membership — currently 211 • Membership has decreased since 2004 (primarily among affiliate members) • June 2003 = 350 members • June 2004 = 284 members • June 2005 = 245 members • June 2006 = 259 members • June 2007 = 233 members • June 2008 = 237 members • June 2009 = 211 members • Evaluation of member needs • Member-to-member interaction • Regional activities desired
SIG Goals and Engagement • Goals since 2008 review • Encourage greater graduate student/campus involvement • Establish international collaborations and membership • Strengthen message with new name/audience • Reach out to broader community of writers, information engineers, technical communicators, and IT professionals working with information • Communication, Website, newsletter, journal proposed • www.sigdoc.org being redesigned • Members-only quarterly newsletter developed by student team at Old Dominion University) • International development goals since 2004 • SIGDOC conferences result in small surpluses (~5K) • Two European conferences since 2005 (Coventry, UK, and Lisbon, Portugal) • SIGDOC 2010 being held in Sao Carlos, Brazil, September 26-29 • Conference planning for Boston (2011), Paris (2012), Seattle (2013) • Engagement with European and South American colleagues • European SIGDOC chapter being established
Volunteers, Representation, Presence • Volunteer growth • Full slate for SIG election • Added Information Director-Webmaster • Added three new Members-at-Large • Representation balanced • 5 academics/4 industry on board • Increase in student membership • Diversity of professional interests • Writer-designers, academic researcher-teachers, managers, and students • Increase in student members (via development of student chapters) • Reputation as high-level technical society for writers • Versus STC, PCS, ATTW, CPTSC • Co-operating with DocEng • Goal to co-operate with other ACM SIGs • Recognition (awards sponsored) • Rigo (individual contributions, e.g., Ramey, U of Washington) • Diana (institutional contributions, e.g., Apple) • Graduate Competition (e.g., U of Waterloo students) • Presence via social networking established for communication design community
Membership/Chapter Creation • Sponsored conferences to increase graduate student involvement • Locating conferences on campuses and seeking sponsorship from schools/colleges for special student registration and membership opportunities • ACM SIGDOC’08 (Lisbon) sponsored by ISCTE and ACM SIGDOC’09 (Bloomington) sponsored by the IU School of Informatics, the Kelley School of Business, and Old Dominion U • 31 students attended (and volunteered) for SIGDOC’09 • European chapter being finalized • Student Chapter formed at Old Dominion U and in the process of forming an NC State U chapter (“welcome meeting” this month) and ECU chapter
Outreach and Community Building • Information distribution: promoting presence of communicator-designers in computer science and beyond • Targeted distribution of new ACM SIGDOC brochure • Quarterly newsletter managed by Old Dominion team • Working on proposal for Communication Design Journal • Half-dozen books on technical communication published since 2002 by ACM SIGDOC members • Investigating strategies for facilitating member/nonmember communication, collaboration, and exchange • Established active social networking presence via Wikipedia (viewed >250 times/month since 2009), Twitter (75 followers, LinkedIn (85 members), Facebook (66 members), Ning (19 members, mostly board members), and Slideshare (2 members, 6 from SIGDOC 2009)