During these past few months, I have had a crash course on the organizational and administrative sides of ACM in general, and SIGCAS in particular! After attending an orientation for new SIG leaders and my first SIG Governing Board meeting in early August, I am happy to report that ACM makes a huge amount of support available to all of its SIGs. We can count on Irene Frawley, our SIG Program Coordinator, and a host of other individuals, to assist us in our work. I am looking forward to expanding our membership and developing new opportunities for the involvement of our members, including new projects that reflect your interests, conference sponsorships, a continued vibrant newsletter and an enhanced web presence. There are many opportunities for us to collaborate with other SIGs and ACM committees as well. I urge you all to visit the websites of other ACM SIGs and committees to get a feel for how we might connect with them.
Many thanks to Tom Jewett and the past members of the SIGCAS Executive Committee - Keith Miller, Herman Tavani, Dianne Martin - for their many years of leadership. I am especially grateful to Tom for his continued support! And, I look forward to good collaboration with Bill Hefley, our new SIGCAS Vice-Chair, Mark Perry, our new SIGCAS Executive Committee member-at-large, Alison Adam, our newsletter editor and Erik Kapocius, our information director.
In a recent email to the SIGCAS community, Ben Shneiderman implored us all to be bold and creative in addressing the serious dangers of unequal access to technology and privacy invasion, and in promoting reliability, security, and universal usability. He reminded us that these topics, as well as other thorny ones, can pose significant challenges, but encouraged us to discuss them openly, and get on with the work of enabling SIGCAS to ?lead the way in promoting awareness and encouraging positive change.? I thank Ben for his continued commitment to SIGCAS and for his inspirational message.
I am very hopeful about SIGCAS' future, and invite all of you to come forward with your suggestions, comments and good work. I look forward to hearing from you as we make our plans for the coming three years. Please feel free to contact me at chair_sigcas@acm.org In my next column, I will report on the input I have received from you.
