SIG Governing Board Meeting
Monday, March 8, 2010

Erik Altman, SIGMICRO Chair
Florence Appel, SIGCAS Chair
Osman Balci, SIGSIM Chair
Elisa Bertino, SIGSAC Chair
Doug Burger, SIGARCH Chair
Donna Cappo, Director, SIG Services
Jack Davidson, ACM Council Rep. to SGB
Bruce Davie, SIGCOMM Chair
Usama Fayyad, SIGKDD Chair
Kathleen Fisher, SGB EC
Lance Fortnow, SIGACT Chair
Maria Gini, SIGART Chair
Brent Hailpern, History Committee
Vicki Hanson, SGB EC
Bob Haring-Smith, SIGUCCS Chair
Yannis Ioannidis, SIGMOD Chair
Jeremy Johnson, SIGSAM Chair
Joe Konstan, SGB EC
Liz Liddy, SIGIR Chair
Patrick Madden, SIGDA Chair
Diana Marculescu, SGB EC
Brad Mehlenbacher, SIGDOC Chair
Ethan Munson, SIGWEB Chair
Klara Nahrstedt, SIGMM Chair
Scott Owen, SIGGRAPH President
Barbara Owens, SIGCSE Chair
David Pennock, SIGecom Chair
Robert Pierce, SIGDOC Vice-Chair
Darren Ramdin, ACM Finance
David Rosenblum, SIGSOFT Chair
Pat Ryan, ACM COO
Hanan Samet, SIGSPATIAL Chair
Andrew Sears, SIGACCESS Chair
Sung Shin, SIGAPP Chair
Janice Sipior, SIGMIS Chair
Mark Stockman, SIGITE Chair
Ricky Sward, SIGAda Chair
Doug Terry, SIGOPS Chair
Lauren Thompson, SIG Services
Gerrit Van der Veer, SIGCHI President
Philip Wadler, SIGPLAN Chair
John White, ACM CEO
Darrell Whitley, SIGEVO Chair
Carey Williamson, SIGMETRICS Chair
Alexander Wolf, SGB Chair

1.0 Welcome, Introductions (Alex Wolf, Vicki Hanson)

2.0 Report from ACM CEO (John White)
Things are going well with respect to membership numbers. At the end of January, there were 69,070 professional members and 27,636 students. Membership satisfaction is at an all time high. There is significant satisfaction with CACM. In 6 years of doing a membership satisfaction survey, the biggest increase in satisfaction was due to the new CACM. 
John White provided financial details. (SIG Chairs may request a copy of the slides presented).
Membership is growing and the Digital Library is having a great year, which is an association-wide effort. Conferences produce content; IS staff continues to enhance it; marketing and sales play a role. 
ACM has the following core priorities: to increase the value proposition for ACM membership, invest in our publishing program, support professions and professional/practitioners, and raise awareness of ACM.
The Digital Library will get a major update in late Spring: new citation pages, new institutional pages, new organization and view for conference proceedings and conference series, eliminating the concept of "The Portal" (which been a confusing branding issue: DL vs. Portal) and focusing on the DL and the ACM Guide to Computing Literature.
ACM also hopes to complete third-party metadata agreements for improved (and definitive for our field) bibliometrics. New web organization is on its way for browsing conference series. 
The internationalization initiative is focusing on 3 regions:  India, China, and Europe, with the goal to increase the level, viability, and relevance of ACM activity. A secondary goal is to increase ACM membership
The approach has been to form regional Councils and work with them to engage in regional goals. ACM Europe Council has a subcommittee on members to generate award and advanced member grade nominations and recommendations for volunteers from Europe. It also has a subcommittee on conferences that engages with SIGs to hold more conference in Europe and represents ACM in engagements with other organizations. The subcommittee on chapters is working to add more European student chapters.
There is a well-established council in India. There was a big launch event of ACM India, which will be considered a learned society under the India Societies Act. A technical symposium was held in January.  ACM India is adding many student chapters and is ready to add professional chapters once registered with the government. 
In conversations with the councils, some ideas emerged; ACM has asked that SIGs hold conferences in Europe. While some SIGs have years of experience in this area, there are risks with holding established conferences outside the US. Rather than moving the conference, it might be best to set up a new conference held every other year. 
If we are trying to get SIGs to move meetings to outside US, it may be best to go with the model of FCRC. One of the ways to bring some focus to what we're doing may be to have a week-long series of ACM conferences, a European, Indian or Chinese version of an FCRC. It may help ACM/SIGs mitigate the risks. ACM is also thinking about establishing a regional speakers program in Europe and India. 
ACM is very much involved and frequently leading activities to maintain and improve the image and health of the computing field. This includes making computer science a visible, viable independent math/science discipline in K-12 - particularly high school. This has become the focus of the Education Policy Committee. ACM wants to real/rigorous computer science to count. 
Another initiative is to shift the image of computing and computer science to attract women and minorities. ACM is co-PI with WGBH on an NSF grant to create a new image for computing that is appealing to college-bound girls. ACM is involved with efforts to try to increase women attending and participating  in computing conferences such as the Grace Hopper conference. 
To recap, ACM has 97,000 members, is publishing a tremendous amount of information, has 170 conferences a year, and participates in many important initiatives.

Discussion:
Usama Fayyad, SIGKDD, noticed that earlier White mentioned conference revenue was positive and wondered what goes into that number. White indicated that when you look at a SIG or collective sigs, member services, running newsletters, etc. are considered operations. The conferences are budgeted separately. Alex Wolf explained that sometimes conferences don't understand why they should provide funds to ACM. The answer is that the conferences subsidize the activities of the SIGs. It’s important that this message gets back to the conference leaders. 
Scott Owen, SIGGRAPH, added that SIGGRAPH Asia will be downsized after 2010, but it will continue. SIGGRAPH is interested in having other conferences co-locate with SIGGRAPH Asia.
Ethan Munson, SIGWEB, thought it would please non-US members to have access to the computer science education efforts.
White said one of the specific things that came out of the information gathering is that in other parts of the world, computer science is well established. There are other issues and ways to take the U.S. experience and translate them to India.
Osman Balci, SIGSIM, added that SIGSIM is holding its conference in Germany. There is pressure for SIGSIM to go outside of the U.S., but they don't know how many members they have. 
Ryan indicated to Balci that ACM HQ could provide that information. 
Erik Altman, SIGMICRO, asked about membership data for SIG members. White said the numbers were generally flat, hanging around 46,000.
Hanan Samet, SIGSPATIAL, brought up the issue of VAT. White agreed that VAT is an issue. When we had ACM Europe Council, we discussed this. If ACM is going to do more European conferences, it will have to get better at handling VAT. Diana Marculescu, SGB EC, said one concern is how to get the SIG members to go. SIGDA has three conferences: one in Europe, one in Asia, and one in the U.S. She suggested enlisting the help of local societies. 
Bruce Davie, SIGCOMM, added that SIGCOMM is one of the SIGs who go outside US once every 3 years. SIGCOMM has made different mistakes, but they are not scared of that, and the out-of-U.S. conferences have been as profitable as those in the U.S. He added that he could share that information with the other SIGs. 
Phil Wadler, SIGPLAN, said SIGPLAN held PPoPP in India and would be happy to share information. He also asked White what happened during the computer science week and whether it was successful. White said there was quite a lot of coverage and word got out to high schools. Next year ACM hopes there will be resources to do more in high schools with computer science during that week. It was a reasonable first start.
Erik Altman, MICRO, asked if ACM has considered other regions such as Central or South America. White said ACM is having discussions on this.
Florence Appel, SIGCAS, said the initiative seemed to mostly focus on women and wondered what efforts were being taken to include minorities in computing. White said ACM is a huge supporter of the Coalition to Diversify Computing. When ACM and other societies decided to look at this, the goal was to pool the focus and fund a committee on this to look at the issues. 
Wolf said if you look back far enough in history, the SIGs represent the center of the ACM activities. If you look at it now, less than half the members are SIG members. A lot of that has to do with DL becoming a big source of revenue. There is a tremendous amount of volunteer activity beyond SIGs. That's healthy for ACM's role for computing, but we have to think of the future of SIGs. Councils are encouraging the growth of chapters. So, he asked, what is the role of a SIG? This led into Vicki Hanson's report from the SGB Membership Task Force.

3.0 Report from SGB Membership Task Force (Hanson) Slides
Wolf said the SIG Membership Task Force came out of 2 other task forces. They saw that SIG membership wasn't increasing while ACM's  was. Why are people engaging with ACM and not SIGs? Wolf had asked various people to look at this and Hanson’s report is a culmination of this. 
Hanson said there have been a couple of other task forces on this topic in the past. This particular task force had a slightly different mission. People from SGB EC, SIG leaders, and ACM were trying to figure out the value of a SIG membership.
They considered the changing landscape: the formation of chapters (CHI, GRAPH, India, and China), the fact that SIGs and SIG-related activities generate valuable DL content, the fact that people get DL access through ACM membership (or institution), and that computing as a discipline is changing. People don't define themselves professionally the same way as in the past. 
They looked at what SIGs do: conferences, newsletters, chapters, affinity groups, listservs, websites, Facebook, Linkedin, outreach, advocacy and education. Considering this they questioned whether traditional membership numbers were the right way to view SIG value. Instead they decided to look at other ways to measurer the impact of a SIG. The task force made two recommendations in the fall. One was to look at SIGs in a different way than membership numbers; also, to think about how they reach goals they set for themselves, how they affect the community. This is the first time they’ve done that. 
The true reach of the SIGs can be measured by how many people are affected by a SIG. They looked at geographic reach, chapters, social networking, websites, and DL material. ACM has the ability to capture additional measures. A first cut of the report was provided by Wayne Graves at ACM using SIGGRAPH as an example. For SIGGRAPH the largest geographic group is in the U.S., then Asia. So the data might indicate that SIGGRAPH Asia is having an effect on membership and reach. The charts provided indicated that SIGGRAPH is truly international. SIGRAPH has active local chapters and a strong social network presence. The SIGGRAPH website received 3.5 million visits in 2009, had 30 million total page views with 1.7 million unique visitors, and an average of 10,000 visits per day to SIGGRAPH.org. So the SIG has a reach well beyond the membership numbers. Regarding DL content, SIGGRAPH materials were cited more than 120,000 times, there are more than 20,000 articles and 27,000 distinct authors. The report indicated the type of information SIGs could get in the future to show their true reach.
In concluding, the task force asked, 'what is the value of a SIG membership?'  They decided that it was belonging to a community of interest and supporting the field. It's not just membership numbers. The task force had two recommendations: 
1) for each SIG to set goals and measure success by the extent to which they meet them. 
2) look at extended information as provided in the SIGGRAPH example for each SIGs viability review.

Discussion:
Wolf indicated that it's interesting to say this notion of community is reflected by retention numbers. Most SIGs have low retention among new members, but long-term retention on older members. Why SIGs don't retain new members is another issue for another task force to look at.
Phil Wadler, SIGPLAN, said there is an issue with print vs. online membership. Quite a few people see value in getting SIGPLAN Notices. So they charge for what it costs to print, and people stop subscribing because print runs will go down and prices go up. Lots of members think they want print. He bets other SIGs are going through this. 
Hanson said that last year the task force looked at why SIGs stop being members and it was divided on the print issue; some wanted to no more print, others wanted print. 
Scott Owen, SIGGRAPH, said SIGGRAPH memberships are all online, and they’re printing only if you buy it. There Is a limited print run but you can buy and pay. 
Yannis Ioannidis, SIGMOD, said they changed membership structure to where you pay more for print, and the number dropped dramatically. Online is the way to go. SIGMOD also has a disc that had Springer, IEEE, and SIGMOD data, but they stopped doing that a year ago, so we have to reassess this. 
Lance Fortnow, SIGACT, added that there is also the issue of younger people thinking if you want to be in a group, you just have to be in a Facebook group. So it’s hard to justify why they should join a SIG. 
Hanson agreed and concluded by saying that ACM will work on making the reach report available to each SIG. 

4.0 Program Reviews 
4.1 SIGACCESS Program Review, Slides, DL Revenue
The financial goals of SIGACCESS are first to maintain its fund balance, then reinvest to benefit the community and try to identify ways to build SIGs. SIGACCESS is thinking of taking the ASSETS conference back to Europe in 2011. ASSETS is the primary source of revenue for the SIG. With conservative budgeting, the SIG’s fund balance has been restored.
Member benefits include a newsletter, reduced registration, access to DL, and e-mail lists. There are two new noteworthy benefits: a new e-mail list for broader community of accessibility events and scholarships to assist practitioners and advocacy groups by providing financial help for ASSETS.  SIGACCESS will be the focal point for the international community interested in accessibility. The leadership led the effort to establish ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing. 
SIGACCESS has an international conference on accessibility and wants to start some workshops and is in-cooperation with a few others. SIGACCESS expects to  support workshops that focus on accessibility which is underrepresented in ASSETS and the community. 
This year SIGACCESS created a Facebook page for the conference. To support a new generation of scientists, they’re doing a doctoral consortium. There have been 52 participants since 2005. SIGACCESS is starting a repository of PhD dissertations and Master's degree theses on accessibility topics. 

Recommendation from the SGB EC: The SGB EC congratulates SIGACCESS on their program performance and finds it viable to continue its status for the next 4 years.

Unanimous approval of recommendation by SGB

Action: Frawley to update viability schedule

4.2 SIGACT Program Review, Slides, DL Revenue
SIGACT is financially in very strong shape, well above the $134,969 fund balance requirement at $743,628. This increased from 2008. SIGACT uses some funds for student conference travel. 
SIGACT sponsors or co-sponsors eight conferences. Member benefits include the SIGACT quarterly newsletter, print and online, access to DL, reduced registration fees, European associations, mailing list, and distinguished service award. Community benefits include the website, e-mail for conferences, looking at social networking, and awards and grants. The SIGACT Committee for Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science helps with funding and publicity to help place theorists in NSF. 
The SIG’s goals are to rethink the role of STOC as flagship conference: it's been successful but it's in competition with other meetings for time and money, many attend a conference only if one has a paper there. 
There’s no clean way to communicate with community. Seems to be happening through individual blogs and twitters but STOC and SIGACT News isn't playing this role, so leaders need to make SIGACT relevant. 
The goals of the SIG are to help the theory community by funding CATCS works with NSF and other agencies. There needs to be a better pipeline of theory into funding agencies. Jobs - help those stuck in tight market, promote theory outside community, preserve history of theory community, professional development - we need to mentor our younger members. 

Discussion:
Wadler, SIGPLAN, how does SIGACT help suggest NSF people?
Fortnow said it's a matter of getting people on the phone and running through names, figuring out who would be movable to DC and getting impressive people to call and convince them what an important responsibility this is. You can't do this on email. You need phone and personal meetings. 
Eric Altman, SIGMICRO, wondered if the SIG should allow conferences to run at loss to get more people to come. Fortnow said if SIGACT does this it'll save 100 to 200 of registration fee, that's a small part when you consider travel and time. He’s not convinced that would make a huge difference. 

Recommendation from the SGB EC: The SGB EC congratulates SIGACT on their program performance and finds it viable to continue its status for the next 4 years.

Unanimous approval of recommendation by SGB

Action: Frawley to update viability schedule

4.3 SIGAda - Program Review, Slides, DL Revenue
SIGAda has one annual conference: SIGAda. The SIG leaders took a serious look at why the conference is losing revenue, vendors and attendees members. SIGAda had been giving too many subsidies to conference volunteers, and are stopping that. Having the conference in DC will help with financial situation. 
Benefits include the annual SIGAda conference and proceedings, Ada Letters published 3 times a year, reduced rates at Ada Europe and SIGAda, academic grants to conferences, and access to the SIGAda web-site. 
Goals include to continue having conference to share developments. It's important to get together once a year in America and 6 months later in Europe. There is always lots of good feedback about collaboration at the conference. There is a high acceptance rate because it's a small community. SIGAda gives the authors good feedback on the papers and has high quality papers. The plan is to continue to publish Ada Letters, continue relationship with AdaEurope, and try to expand connections with India and China. 
SIGAda plans to have a booth at SIGCSE. They want to advocate Ada in safety, critical, high-integrity systems as well as cyber-security systems. 
They need to think about the volunteers' well-being by having less email, more structured meetings, and by using a ACM's preferred registration vendor rather than volunteer leaders. 
Another goal is to connect to ICW SIGs with reciprocal agreements and to continue academic outreach and support. 

Discussion:
Erik Altman, SIGMICRO indicated that Ada is the 33rd most popular programming language. He asked if the leadership thought that would go up? Mehlenbacher indicated they have a niche.

Recommendation from the SGB EC: The SGB EC congratulates SIGAda on their program performance and finds it viable to continue its status for the next 4 years.

Recommendation of SGB
Approved (31,0,1)

Action: Frawley to update viability schedule

4.4 SIGCAS - Program Review, Slides, DL Revenue
SIGCAS has saved money by moving to online-only publications. SIGCAS is a very interdisciplinary field with 477 members. There has been a gradual 12% decline since 2006. The major member benefit is Computers & Society, the online newsletter. For the past 2 years it has been supported by a 6-member editorial board with editorial responsibilities rotating. 
In-cooperation conference benefits: SIGCAS cooperated with 9 conferences in 2009 and 4 in 2010. SIGCAS seeks in-cooperation agreements with international conferences. 
Award recipients reflect the highly interdisciplinary nature of our membership and community.
Goals include community involvement, striving to contribute to policy decisions relating to the social and ethical impact of computing and to support their implementation. On the Education Council, IFIP TCS has a SIGCAS representative. There are many collaborations with SIGCSE. Together they rewrote keywords regarding social/ethical impact and professional practice, CCSC regional computing ethics workshops, in-cooperation agreements.
Challenges that face SIGCAS include a diffuse community. It’s difficult to establish and maintain an organizational focus/agenda for a majority of members. 
SIGCAS is pursuing a collaboration with IEEE SSSIT.
SIGCAS needs to have more continuity at leadership level and engage more volunteers. The newsletter is not peer reviewed, but it is edited. The leadership is looking to change the newsletter and make it more attractive to wider audience of submitters. 

Discussion:
Phil Wadler, SIGPLAN, liked that the scope of the SIG being included on the slides and suggested that all the SIGs should do it. 
Erik Altman, SIGMICRO, asked if the newsletter reaches an international audience. Appel said a quarter of the newsletter submissions are international, but they could probably pursue more connection with the international community.

Recommendation from the SGB EC: The SGB EC congratulates SIGCAS on their program performance and finds it viable to continue its status for the next 4 years.

Unanimous approval of recommendation by SGB

Action: Frawley to update viability schedule

5.0 Publications Update (Jack Davidson)
	The strategic vision of the publications board is to make ACM the preferred publisher in computing. There are continual improvements in getting high quality content within the DL and the Guide to Computing Literature. 
	There are 6 journals, 31 transactions, 8 magazines, 23 newsletters, and 10 other periodicals. The pubs board is always looking for new ideas for content if there's a need for it.
	In FY '09, ACM published 284 conferences and related workshop proceedings (47 in ICPS). ACM also signed an agreement with Springer to include LNCS metadata in the DL. That material will be added and is a welcome addition. 
	ICPS is a venue for placing material in the DL that is not formally sponsored by ACM or SIGs. After feedback in March 2009 meeting, the Pubs Board decided there should be more formal oversight of the ICPS series. They initiated a search for Editor in Chief and editorial board of ICPS. A search committee was formed. Thomas Rodden was asked to be the EiC and is currently in the process of putting in place an editorial board and an advisory board (with significant SIG representation).
	Davidson discussed EiC selections and terms. A term for EiC is 3 years. Prior to naming an EiC the publications board contacts the relevant SIGs for input. Typically a search takes 4 or 5 months. They're continually on-going as people's terms end.
	Davidson mentioned the Pubs board continues to handle all plagiarism issues. Investigating these cases is very time-consuming. FY '09 saw increase in number of plagiarism cases reported. ACM participated in development of CrossCheck, an anti-plagiarism service. It is expected to be integrated into Manuscript Central. The Pubs board is asking EiCs to use CrossCheck for articles accepted for publication. Ideally this early warning system will curtail the rise of plagiarism cases. 

Discussion:

Hanan Samet, SIGSPATIAL, was concerned about an overlapping conference accepted as an ICPS proceedings. Davidson indicated that the newly formed ICPS editorial board is expected to oversee those issues in the future and expects there will be consultation with appropriate SIGs as appropriate.  
Diana Marculescu, SGB EC, said the process SIGDA uses offers a common database. The same paper submitted to two different events can be caught. SIGDA actually has had great success and any SIG can use it. 
Patrick Madden, SIGDA offered to make the URL available to interested SIG leaders.
It's run out of the University of Michigan servers. Igor Markov is in charge of it. It's open source fairly simple extraction of PDF files. 
Janice Sipior, SIGMIS, asked what the source of database for CrossCheck is. Davidson said all the publishers  are participating and providing content. Sipior asked if book publishers would also be involved. John White said it's basically journal articles at this time.
Joe Konstan, SGB EC, added that it seems like having the EiC in place for ICPS is a great stance to take with things to be published. He believes that ACM could run into issues on the selection of proceedings by not knowing acceptance rates or the papers not being full papers. Requiring that information for the editorial board to review would be great. 

6.0 Tech Pack (Doug Terry)
	A tech pack is a "blended learning package" on a particular topic with a focus aimed at practitioners and managers and initiated by the Professional Development committee. Tech packs include a collection of articles from the ACM DL, ACM online books and courses, videos, interviews, podcasts, lectures, blogs, discussion groups, etc. The idea is to put these materials together and accompany them with narratives and annotations to put the works in perspective. Resources selected for a Tech Pack must be reviewed by practitioners. Some Tech Pack Committees may include SIG leaders. 
	Some topics include cloud computing, parallel programming, mobile systems, globalization, security, business intelligence and data mining, collaboration domain knowledge, storage systems, green computing, scientific computing, and open source. The goal is for Tech Packs to encourage new ACM and SIG membership, especially from practitioners. Tech Packs bring visibility to the SIG's offerings. 
	The open issues are how to best present this material: through a web page, structured lessons, DL annotations? And how often we should update this material? How to evaluate if it is meeting the needs of the target audience, what should we call these things? If you have Tech Pak ideas or input please contact Lillian Israel or David Schneider at ACM HQ.

Discussion:
Alex Wolf said it looks wonderful and is a great idea and a heck of a lot of work. He thanked Terry and asked if ACM was thinking about how to track the access of this material?
Doug Terry, SIGOPS agreed that was a good point, to figure out whether they are accessing this material because of searching the DL or the Tech Pack. 
Joe Konstan suggested that ACM encourage the social computing side of this. If a community grows up around this, it'll be great. 
Terry said his understanding is that any ACM member will have access to Tech Pack for free, even without DL membership. 
White asked Terry how much work was involved in putting this together. Terry responded that it was not too much work because he was already familiar with this area. It was work, but in his case it wasn't bad because this topic was fresh in his mind. 
Erik Altman asked if there is any competition for this, such as a cloud computing for dummies type thing. Terry indicated that if ACM thought those were relevant, they'd add it to the Tech Pack. 
Yannis Ioannidis asked if the material will be read only or if there would be some sort of self-evaluation.  Terry explained that thought was given to make it like course material with exams, etc. but it was decided to do something simple and then go from there. 

7.0 History Committee Report (Brent Hailpern)
	Mark Scott Johnson is the curator in chief for Turing Award Website and will maintain it over time. Hailpern indicated that they could use a design consultant. Help and ideas from the SIGs is welcome. 
	The Charles Babbage Institute is capturing SIG documents. This is being handled through Thomas Misa (tmisa@umd.edu). There are only 5 SIGs on ACM History Wiki (historywiki.acm.org/sigs/Main_Page -  MOBILE, OPS, PLAN, SOFT and UCCS. Hailpern encouraged the SIG leaders to find representatives to become involved. David Wise and Richard Snodgrass are past chairs of the History Committee and will be rotating off the HC - we are looking for new candidates from SIG community

Discussion:
Alex Wolf wondered if the Babbage Institute is keeping membership statistics and that type of data. Cappo indicated that she passed the SIG membership statistics on as requested and indicated that the information would continue to be maintained on the SIG site.   

Alex Wolf thanked the SIG Governing Board leaders whose terms would be ending on June 30th. He thanked Bob Walker and Jack Davidson for their service as Council Reps and Kathleen Fisher and  Dave Johnson for their service as Members-at-Large. He thanked Joe Konstan for all his help as Past Chair and Vicki Hanson for the fine job as Vice Chair; keeping the meetings running smoothly and on time particularly when the agenda was full. Wolf thanked the SIG Services staff. 

Alex Wolf was thanked for serving as SGB Chair by acclamation of the SGB. 

Program Reviews Continued
4.5 SIGCSE - Program Review, Slides, DL Revenue
SIGCSE is healthy with a $470,000 fund balance and 2,600 members. The first SIGCSE electronic newsletter was published and this summer there will be a new magazine which will have 3 issues. The leadership is proud of this accomplishment. 
The annual SIGCSE conference is the flagship event of the SIG. Half  the membership attends; it's like a family. SIGCSE provides continuing education for members through 39 workshops and a new faculty workshop. The SIG also sponsors ITiCSE which is a non-US conference.
	SIG benefits include small research grants in learning and teaching, a very active member list serve with opt in, and social media outlets.  SIGCSE is the premier organization for computing education. It serves post-secondary school students and has a strong relationship with CSTA. The goal is to extend reach and influence of computing education. The majority of members of ACM Education committees are or have been SIGCSE officers or part of large conference leadership. There's been a large broadening of participation at the SIGCSE symposium, which has led to their goal of increasing  interest in computing. 
	
Recommendation from the SGB EC: The SGB EC congratulates SIGCSE on their program performance and finds it viable to continue its status for the next 4 years.

Unanimous approval of recommendation by SGB

Action: Frawley to update viability schedule

4.6 SIGDA - Program Review, Slides, DL Revenue
	SIGDA has $1.6 million in bank, with a minimum fund balance of $1 million. The SIG leadership does have a major financial concern: the DAC conference. It's a $4 million conference, but the exhibit is shrinking which is having a major affect on revenue.  The conference is co-sponsored by SIGDA, IEEE CEDA and the EDA Consortium. This also poses challenges as each organization attempts to fulfill their own mission. Madden is working closely with the co-sponsors on the financial and administrative issues associated with the conference. 
	SIGDA serves people who design and fabricate integrated circuits. Many are electrical engineers. SIGDA is trying to bring in more computer scientists. SIGDA has a PhD forum, university booth, and design automation summer school. It's an unusual field. There are good speakers and industry recruiters. There's an outstanding contribution award and best paper award. 
SIGDA has been doing digital things for a number of years. 
	The goal is to raise awareness about design automation. SIGDA is trying to encourage people to come into the field. Another goal is to migrate the SIGDA website over to Plone for maintenance. 

Discussion:
Yannis Ioannidis said that besides the conference, Madden mentioned other activities. Are these separate or co-located?
Madden said they're co-located with DAC and include the University Booth Program and PhD Forum. 

Recommendation from the SGB EC: The SGB EC congratulates SIGDA on their program performance and finds it viable to continue its status for the next 4 years.

Unanimous approval of recommendation by SGB

Action: Frawley to update viability schedule

8.0 SGB Administrative Report (Wolf)
8.1 Update on ACM EC and Council Activities
The SGB chair is a member of the ACM EC and Council. This reflects the significance of the role the SIGs play in the overall ACM. One of the biggest questions the ACM leadership asked at the last meetings had to do with finances. As John indicated this morning, the SIGGRAPH conference has had trouble recently, but it's not the only one. OOPSLA used to be one of the top 5 conferences but no longer. It's now called SPLASH and is entering another stage of its lifecycle. It's important for SIG leaders to remember that conferences do have a lifecycle. SIG leaders should have involvement in the steering committees to understand the issues being faced by conferences. SIG leaders should be involved in the direction the conference is going. 
We started having conferences sponsored by the SGB instead of a particular SIG. Joe Konstan has taken the lead on this program and we will be sponsoring conferences on Bioinformatics and Health Informatics. The SGB is now taking oversight of the Middleware conference. There are conferences that could use some support which don't have a SIG counterpart so we're developing them through the SGB EC. 
Continuing in the vein of conferences, Wolf reported on a conference that was shared among several SIGs: the SOFTVIS conference. This is an event that started out as a workshop sponsored by SIGSOFT. Now it's co-sponsored by 4 SIGs. This year they decided to co-locate with an IEEE event in a related area (VISWeek). The problem was that the steering committee also decided to abandon ACM sponsorship for IEEE CS. This is a real problem because conferences are our biggest asset. In the legal sense these are assets. Maybe there wasn't much communication between the steering committee and SIGs. It took a great deal of time to sort this out with the conference leaders, the VIS Week leaders and IEEE.   It is the responsibility of the SIG leaders to protect the assets of the organization and to provide continuity and history for events that are part of the ACM SIG conference portfolio. 

Klara Nahrstedt - We have a reverse case of this where a conference sponsored by another society wants to come to ACM. 
Alex - Staff worked with SOFTVIS committee to help them to understand the issues regarding ownership of the conference. We don't want to be in the business of stealing and giving away conferences. There is precedence for some societies relinquishing sponsorship and he suggested that the SIG or conference leaders work with Donna Cappo if there are any questions on this. Cappo suggested that Nahrstedt let the conference organizers know that ACM would need written confirmation from the sponsoring society relinquishing sponsorship to ACM in order for ACM to move ahead. Conference organizers should work directly with the sponsoring society.  
Doug Terry - in long term what is a conference's relationship with ACM?
Donna Cappo- ACM can prove ownership by use of the name and past sponsorship. 
Alex Wolf - It is important to make it explicit between steering committee and the SIG that the ownership is with the SIG and ACM.
Ethan Munson - it's useful to have a SIGWEB rep on the steering committees. Make sure that person has the SIG's interests at heart. 
Joe Konstan - think of this as a relationship with the sub-community in the conference. It's critical when these conferences happen that there's someone explaining there's a sponsor. 
Alex Wolf- The most important thing is that it's a relationship and we're a community. It's not a faceless organization executing oversight. 
Phil Wadler- There are arguments about why ACM involvement is important. 
Alex Wolf- The relationship to the SIG and ACM must be part of your dialogue over and over again with the conference members. The SIG leaders have an obligation to the organization to stay connected and informed regarding the conferences they sponsor.

8.2 Lifetime Membership
There are nearly 1,100 ACM lifetime members in the 4-year old program. Individuals can now become a lifetime member of the ACM but not the SIG. At the ACM level if you're under 49, the charge is 20 times the annual fee, in your 50s it's 12 times, in your 60s it's 10 times. Wolf indicated that he'd be happy if his SIG instituted it, but there's a question of cost to the SIG. Another concern is that the SIG benefits may change. As a general principle it makes sense however there are concerns. All SIGs would need to have a similar structure because it would be chaotic for individual SIGs to have their own unique programs. 

Discussion:
Bruce Davie, SIGCOMM - There are people who do this for a living and they're called actuaries. You need to do it somewhat consistently among SIGs. You need tools that make it easy. 
John White- I think it's important to go back to a point Alex made about cost. There was a great deal of analysis of age brackets for the ACM program. We looked at the costs of products and services and that can be more complicated for the SIGs. 
Alex Wolf- do you lose your ACM fellowship if you're no longer a member?
John White - if you're not a member, it doesn't make a lot of sense to be a fellow. 
Doug Terry - Some will not participate because their companies pays for a yearly membership. This shouldn't be SIG by SIG, it should be across the board.  
Joe Konstan- This is complicated issue. We have had 2 SIGs that have been dechartered recently. What would we do with those lifetime members? SIGs were supposed to be lightweight. the SIGs may prefer sustained membership where you're automatically billed annually. I think we're most likely reacting to the convenience. 
Carey Williamson - Is this DL or just membership?
John White- you can do the DL as well. 
Alex Wolf- there's interest in it but there's a lot of prickly issues with it. The staff has to provide input on the actuarial type input and the turnover with the SIGs has to be looked at. It's not inconceivable that in 15 years, there won't be dues. What about the lifetime members then?

Action: Doug Burger, Joe Konstan, Ethan Munson, Andrew Sears, and Darrell Whitley volunteered to participate in a taskforce to review this issue and make a recommendation to the SGB EC. 

8.3 SGB Election Update (Joe Konstan) 
We have enough qualified candidates to have contention for each. Jack Davidson and Vicki Hanson up for SGB election. Konstan gave explanations of elections. Balloting will be open for a month. In early June we'll have elections. 

Program Reviews Continued
4.7 SIGDOC - Program Review, Slides, DL Revenue
	Brad Mehlenbacher explained that he was providing a review based on input from the SGB following the SIGDOC 2008 viability review when the SIGDOC leaders were asked to focus on membership issues. 
	The  fund balance is healthy at $70,000 but they continue to see a decline in membership. After 2008, they reestablished 4 major goals: encourage greater grad student/campus involvement, establish international collaborations and membership, strengthen message with new audience, reach out to broader community. SIGDOC is excited to be hosting a conference in Brazil in 2010. They are planning further out to encourage participation. They are beginning to focus on volunteer development and have  20 members who have volunteered to play a role. These individuals are from both industry and academia. There is a lot of diversity within the memberhsip. 
	The leadership is increasing graduate student involvement by locating conferences on campuses and giving out scholarships. They are trying to get a European chapter finalized. Outreach and community building - information distribution, promoting presence of communicator-designers in CS and beyond. We're discussing expanding communications. The SIG is vibrant and active. 

Recommendation from the SGB EC: The SGB EC acknowledges the progress made by SIGDOC leadership over the past 2 years and finds SIGDOC viable to continue its status for the next 2 years.
 
Lance Fortnow: Curious as to why 2 years and not 4?
Alex - there is progress being made and it's to be sure that the progress is still on course. 
SIGDOC - Our numbers from chapter development alone will help. 

Unanimous approval of recommendation by SGB

Action: Frawley to update viability schedule

4.8 SIGGRAPH - Program Review, Slides, DL Revenue
Scott reported that the previous night’s telecast of the Academy Awards featured a winner on the SIGGRAPH EC. 
SIGGRAPH lost $2.8 million last year. SIGGRAPH Asia cost more than they'd thought. 
SIGGRAPH 2010 has cut 20% from its budget and is heading back to west coast. SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 has a very lean budget.
SIGGRAPH should be above the required fund balance in 3-4 years. From 2011 onward, they are committing to a small SIGGRAPH Asia. The SIGGRAPH presentations are captured and placed In the DL and are pretty heavily downloaded, so they are pretty popular.
This year they created a new award. Owen discussed SIGGRAPH goals. The first goal is an internal goal and it is to be a more efficient organization. The SIGGRAPH conference was efficient but the organization as a whole wasn't. The EC members had operational responsibilities. The volunteers had a limited amount of time. Now the EC focuses on broad issues, and there's a new structure. They want to support the technical community. 

Another major goal is strong alliances with external organizations: Eurographics, Digital Content Association of Japan, Computer Graphics - ARTS (Japan), NCACG

SIGGRAPH wants to support the education community and the digital Arts Community. Their education committee has its own website. 

SIGGRAPH wants to expand their chapters committee. They're always looking for new ones. They had a disconnect that chapter members are not members of SIGGRAPH. So they created an associate member - no voting privileges, no DL access, but they get the electronic newsletter and are non-voting members. It's being implemented them now. 

SIGGRAPH successfully sponsors/co-sponsors 12-20 conferences per year and is in-coop with 20-30 events a year. 

Dave Pennock - strong technical and industry side - comments on how that developed? 
Scott Owen - it's the nature of the field. Once they realized it could be used for entertainment, they started using it in movies, then games. It's not unusual.
Wadler - we have a problem with OOPSLA, we feel sympathetic. You said you'd cut the budget by 20%, how is that helping?
Owen - it's going back to LA that will help. In 2008, we turned a profit of $400-$500,000 and our budget is 30% less than last time we were in LA. We're expecting a lot more attendance. 
Hanan Samet - best practice is going where your audience is. I gave a tutorial at SIGGRAPH and there were 550 local people there. 
Erik Altman - how much of your planning was locked down in 08?
GRAPH - we were expecting a $100-$200,000 loss. It happened in 2002 and it happened in 2009. 

Recommendation from the SGB EC: The SGB EC is hopeful that the actions being taken by the SIGGRAPH leadership will stabilize SIGGRAPH finances and build the SIGGRAPH fund balance. Recognizing the serious nature of the SIGGRAPH financial issues, the SGB EC would like a written report sent to the large SIG Advisor in 1 year with an update on the plan outlined today and finds SIGRAPH viable to continue its status for the next 2 years.
Unanimous approval of recommendation by SGB

Action: Frawley to update viability schedule

9.0 SIG Proposal Report (Kathleen Fisher)
There are 4 proposals. For those that the committee advises to proceed, the group will need to address any concerns that the SGB EC takes from today's meeting. Following that, the organizers will work with ACM staff to draft bylaws and a budget.

9.1 Social Computing - Review Completed
Based on SGB input, it was decided not to pursue the SIGSOC proposal. There was concern about the scope not being clear and that SIGCHI had significant investment in this area. 

9.2 Health Informatics - Under Review
SIGHINF: Promote the interests of professionals working on health informatics research, education, and development by bringing together the computing, engineering, statistics, information science, social science, medical and nursing communities, confirmed volunteers, community support: ACM Informatics conference in DC in November

Discussion:
Ethan Munson, SIGWEB, said he thinks this is a great idea, great amount of funding and research in these areas. We have to do this. 
John White asked if there were any details on Health Informatics conference?
Donna Cappo, SIG Services, CFP is being distributed electronically
Joe Konstan, SGB EC, said they are holding the event following the AMIA conference. There are 2 AMIA leaders on their board. 
Gerrit Van der Veer, SIGCHI, suggested that we await input from the town meeting being planned for the conference to gauge interest on the potential SIG. 

9.3 Game - Under Review
SIGGAME: To foster, promote and communicate high-quality research in the science, design, engineering, technology, educational applications, and culture of computer games. 
There are extensive overlaps with SIGGRAPH and other SIGs. SIG feedback:
SIGGRAPH - recommend that SGB consider the establishment of a new formal multi-sig structure that would serve the purpose of giving the academic games community their desired "large stamp of approval"
Ethan Munson - supports 
Doug Burger, SIGARCH - on fence
Barbara Owens, SIGCSE - complementary to the SIGCSE mission but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a separate SIG. 
David Rosenblum, SIGSIM - in favor
Osman Balci, SIGSIM - on target
Bruce Davie, SIGCOMM - We co-sponsor with NetGames conference. I's networks for gaming, 
Fisher - they want to be in-cooperation with the activities mentioned and co-sponsored down the road
Maria Gini, SIGART - FDG conference, 250 people was a boat cruise in Florida, so I have no idea if there are enough people to sustain a conference. 
Ethan Munson, SIGWEB - one of the reasons we supported is the education component. Tight connections with programs students on a very popular topic
Klara Nahrstedt, MM - concern that the community is starting to get very fractured. Game is an application. 
Joe Konstan - to speak in favor of this. This is a whole point of a SIG. These are units formed to sustain activities. At one time or another half of these SIGs could have been absorbed by other communities. 
Gerrit Van der Veer- it's a community. We want to know if the community should be expanded to serious gaming - military. 
Scott Owen - the discussion at SIGGRAPH (conference committee, EC) if you look at why they want to establish the SIG is to get the imprint of ACM on the academic part. We want to have a multi-SIG. There's something broken with current SIG structure. SGB needs to be flexible in the structure. 
Alex Wolf, SGB EC- I am concerned about the notion that we're trying to partition the field. It's a hopeless exercise. If there's a group of people who have a viable set of meetings, an educational mission, a multi-billion industry behind it. What is the threat? Is it fracturing the community? It's already fractured. This seems to add some coherence to the community's events. I don't see any downside of acknowledging there can be cross cutting of SIGs. 
Patrick Madden, SIGDA - I can think at a conference, there's a lot of stuff I want to go to, others I don't. It's a good clustering of content to me. 
Jeremy Johnson, SIGSAM - this would be very helpful. 
Yannis Ioannidis, SIGMOD is in favor of SIGGAME. On this discussion which is more general than SIGGAME now. I think we should be careful not to stop the collaboration between SIGs. Having different communities with overlaps would be healthy. We should not forget about our roots. 
Jeremy Johnson, SIGSAM - perhaps there could be some membership arrangement where you could get overlapping SIGs without paying for all separately. 
Usama Fayyad, SIGKDD - if we exclude a SIG like this, community will go to another society. 
Patrick Madden, SIGDA - You'd have a bunch of USC and UCLA people at a technical program in LA. E3 was lots of bells and whistles, but didn't feel technical content. I see SIGGAME as a group making a lot of sense to me. 
Scott Owen, GRAPH - I've been to 2-3 game conferences. We went to SIGGRAPH last year; we took this algorithm and put it in a game. 
Joe Konstan, SGB EC - I'm sure Scott is right. Even if this group didn't advance research in this area, if they are practitioners interested in causes, that's reason for a SIG. How do we view the nature of the conference? Some SIGs just have a meeting where people get together and there's not research, that's fine. Let's be sure and classify this. 
Hanan Samet, SIGSPATIAL - one thing in favor of formation of this SIG - there should be some real stakeholders. 
Kathleen Fisher, SGB EC - they put a lot of work into this proposal. I see there are many causes for concern, but there's no reason to think there's no stakeholders. 
Barbara Owen, SIGCSE - some of these stakeholders came to us and we see it as complementary to SIGCSE. 

9.4 Bioinformatics - Under Review
SIGBIO - Bioinformatics - improve ability to develop research, training, and outreach in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Biomedical Informatics by stimulating interactions among researchers, educators and practitioners. 

Liz Liddy, SIGIR - We haven't responded because there isn't agreement on these. Many people who attend our conference are active in this field. 
Usama Fayyad, SIGKDD - EC unanimously approved this. 
Lance Fortnow, SIGACT - What are they planning to do differently than **?
Joe Konstan, SGB EC - they had a conference and it was successful and they came to ACM. They have experience with conferences and now we'll see what happens with their conference this summer. 
Yannis Ioannidis, SIGMOD - area with great importance. Concern: The field is much broader than the current proposers have suggested. 
Maria Gini, SIGART - This is a very important area. People in computational biology publish in journals, not at conferences. They are different from other computer science fields. 

Alex thanked Kathleen because it's a tremendous amount of work reading over these proposals and working with the leadership. Fisher will discuss the SGB comments with the proposers and ask them to provide input, bylaws and draft budgets for further review and discussion.

Alex thanked the SIG Services staff for being supportive and professional and thanked Joe for his work as Past Chair and Vicki as Vice Chair. 

Vicki closed the meeting.