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SIGDOC Newsletter
June 2009 :: Volume 10, Number 2
Our Members
Notes from the Chair
Dear SIGDOC Members,
I hope our Program Chairs, Shaun Slattery and Ashley Williams, have received your conference proposals by now and that we'll be seeing you October 5th-7th in Bloomington, Indiana, for this year's International Conference on Design of Communication (ACM SIGDOC 09). I just returned from visiting Bloomington, Indiana, with our esteemed SIGDOC Co-Chair, Newsletter Editor, and Conference Local Arrangements Chair, Rob Pierce, and although Rob knew the campus well (as an undergraduate alumni of their Computer Science Program), it was my first visit to the fair, midwestern city.
A shuttle takes you directly from the airport to the Biddle Hotel and Conference Center in Indiana Memorial Union (http://www.imu.indiana.edu/hotel/index.shtml) on the Indiana University Bloomington campus (http://www.iub.edu/) where you're within fifteen minutes walking distance of everything you need for a wonderful conference experience. The campus is gorgeous, and it's no surprise that it's routinely ranked one of the most beautiful campuses in the nation. In the span of a day-and-a-half, I was able to take in Dunn's Woods (a forest running directly through the center of campus), the IU Arboretum, Art Museum (http://www.iub.edu/~iuam/iuam_home.php), campus Auditorium (http://www.iuauditorium.com/aud09/index.aspx), the School of Informatics (http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/), and the Kelley School of Business (http://kelley.iu.edu/).
Directly across from the campus gates is Kirkwood Avenue, a Chapel Hill-like mainstreet teaming with local pubs, restaurants, and my favorite funky coffee house complete with wireless (although our hotel provides it as well). And next to Kirkwood is Fourth Street, also known as "restaurant row," which is lined back-to-back with International restaurants (I spotted Moroccan, Thai, and Indian places that I'd like to check out in October). As it was, there were plenty of places to eat directly in the Biddle Hotel and Conference Center/Indiana Memorial Union (see, especially, the Tudor Room: http://www.imu.indiana.edu/dining/index.shtml). Anyway, I've been effusive enough for one pre-conference update. Please assume that we did manage to get a lot of work done while we were in Bloomington, aesthetic as the setting was. Our interactions with faculty and facilities folks were upbeat and productive and the campus -- with its high-quality academic programs, schools, centers, and institutes -- seems a perfect backdrop for an excellent ACM SIGDOC '09 conference.
In the meantime, several members of your small but active SIGDOC board have been busy exploring alternative ways of getting our organizational message out and online. In addition to designing an updated SIGDOC brochure, we have been experimenting with Ning and Facebook social networking spaces, and adding historical and current information about SIGDOC to our new Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGDOC).
Finally, please mark your calendars for our conference next October in Bloomington, Indiana, and hosted by the School of Informatics on the Indiana University campus The ACM SIGDOC 2009 Website for our upcoming 27th International Conference on Design of Communication being held from October 5th until October 7th, 2009, provides additional information: http://www.sigdoc.org/2009/index.html.
Looking very forward to seeing you in October!
Brad Mehlenbacher
Associate Professor, Training and Development (ACCE),
Adjunct/Associate Professor, Ergonomics (PSYCH),
and Affiliated Faculty, PhD in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (COM/ENG)
NC State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-7801
919.515.6242 (ph)
chair_sigdoc@acm.org (e-mail)
www4.ncsu.edu/~brad_m (url)
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SIGDOC Board Election
It has been two years since our last ACM election for the Executive Board positions of all its Special Interest Groups (SIGs), so that ACM SIGDOC Elections will be held this upcoming Spring, 2009, for another two-year term. Once again we've got a fantastic list of potential candidates running for the Executive Board positions of Chair, Vice-Chair, and Secretary/Treasurer, so please be sure to cast your vote the minute you receive the election information as it's made available by Dr. Shihong Huang, our Nominations Chair. The Candidate List is as follows:
ACM SIGDOC Election Candidate List, 2009-2011
Chair:
Brad Mehlenbacher, North Carolina State University
David Novick, University of Texas at El Paso
Vice-Chair:
Robert Pierce, IBM Rational Software
John Stamey, Coastal Carolina University
Secretary/Treasurer:
Shaun Slattery, DePaul University
Liza Potts, Old Dominion University
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Membership Committee
We have established a membership committee (consisting of David Novick, Kathy Haramundanis, and John Stamey) to develop strategies for increasing our SIG's membership numbers. Importantly, this is not an issue that only we are facing. The Association for Computing Machinery has, in fact, established a task force to look specifically at declining SIG membership across the organization; this year, for example, SIGs lost approximately 1000 members and, since, 2001, they lost over 3000 members. SIGDOC's membership, since 2004, has decreased 18%. Importantly, though, we have a very healthy fund balance that is up 36% from 2004-2008. In these volatile times, having an annual membership fee of $35 dollars for professionals and $25 dollars for students puts us in an excellent position to grow if we're cautious and strategic!
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