


Special Interest Groups (SIGs) provide an opportunity to attract a group of conference attendees who share a common interest and engage them in face-to-face discussions. Organizing a SIG is a great way to start or extend your involvement in the CHI conference program - several SIGs have evolved into other successful venues at subsequent conferences. In addition to interesting and innovative SIG topics, we also encourage interesting and innovative approaches to organizing and conducting the SIG itself. Feel free to contact us before submitting a proposal to discuss your ideas and questions.
Jeff Pierce, IBM Research
James Lin, IBM Research
Contact us: sigs@chi2009.org
Special Interest Groups (SIGs) enable conference attendees sharing a common interest to meet informally for 90 minutes of facilitated discussion during a scheduled session at the conference. SIGs offer excellent opportunities for dialog and deliberation on a specific topic. The conference provides each SIG with meeting space and advertises SIG meetings to the rest of the conference in the Extended Abstracts and Conference Program.
Submissions for SIGs must be received by 7 January 2009 (5:00 PM PST). Make submissions via the PCS submission system. You will need to submit a single PDF file, no larger than 4 megabytes large, consisting of:
While not strictly required, we prefer that proposals be authored by a minimum of two individuals representing at least two different organizations. We also encourage prospective submitters to examine examples of accepted SIG abstracts from recent CHI conferences, available for download from the ACM Digital Library.
Submissions will be reviewed independently by reviewers, with final acceptance decisions made by the SIGs chairs. We will notify authors of acceptance decisions by 30 January 2009.
Accepted SIGs will have a scheduled session at the conference. After your SIG is accepted, we will notify you what technical support will be available — the SIG rooms may not have A/V support provided, but you can provide your own projector if desired. Rooms will be set up to facilitate discussion.
After the conference, organizers are encouraged to continue their SIG by organizing a workshop at a future conference or creating and maintaining a website. Accepted SIG abstracts will be distributed in the CHI Conference Extended Abstracts DVD. They will also be placed in the ACM Digital Library, where they will remain accessible to researchers and practitioners worldwide.