SIGCAS Chair’s message

Flo Appel

Saint Xavier University

appel@sxu.edu

SIGCAS year-end report

As I put the finishing touches on the 2009-2010 annual SIGCAS report, I am reflecting on the events and activities of the past year.  The highpoint of the year was our forty-year retrospective issue, featuring interviews with past SIGCAS award recipients and an overview of the past forty years of publication.   Connecting with so many luminaries in our vast interdisciplinary field provided a rare opportunity for our editors and readers. Our challenges still remain, especially the one of marshalling our forces to maintain the vibrancy and viability of SIGCAS.  Our greatest strength (our interdisciplinarity) also poses our greatest challenge: how to direct enough of our diffuse energy to SIGCAS.   Our membership is so well-connected in so many professional, academic and advocacy areas, that there often do not seem to be enough hours in the day to focus on an umbrella organization such as we are.   Nevertheless, our role is vital to ACM, as we continue to raise the pressing social and ethical issues of our times in the Education Council, in USACM, and other ACM venues.  As always, we continue to seek your involvement in SIGCAS and invite you to visit the volunteer opportunities page on our website.  Also please see “Volunteer Opportunities” directly after this column for more details.

Gearing up for SIGCAS elections next year

The next round of SIGCAS elections will take place in the 2010-2011 membership year, which runs from July through June.  The call for nominations will occur sometime after the first of the 2011 year.   If you have been a member of SIGCAS and benefited from its offerings, and have wondered how you might give something back, this is an excellent time to consider running for office.  The three-year Executive Committee positions up for election are chair, vice-chair and at-large.  If you would like more information about what kind of time and professional commitment each of these positions entails, please feel free to contact me, Diana or Mark (email addresses on page 2).  We are especially looking for new memberships to step up and infuse SIGCAS with new ideas and energy! 

Connections and collaborations

We continue to enjoy collegial relations with a number of kindred organizations regarding conferences and shared scholarly work.  In March, we sponsored our regular SIGCAS Birds of a Feather (BOF) at the SIGCSE Symposium in Milwaukee.  And, I have just returned from San Jose, California, representing SIGCAS at the twentieth annual ACM Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) conference, at which I was given the opportunity to describe SIGCAS to the audience, and present Cem Kaner with his Making a Difference award.  This was the first CFP conference I had ever attended, and I was deeply impressed by the participation and level of discourse at the meeting.  And, we have been approached by the IEEE’s Society for the Social Implications of Technology (SSIT) to collaborate with them on their annual conference (ISTAS), scheduled for June 2011 in Chicago.  If you are interested in working on this event, please let me know!    

On the publication front, we note that our December 2009 issue of Computers and Society showcased five papers that had been presented at CEPE (Computer Ethics, Philosophical Enquiry) , the biennial conference of INSEIT; our next issue (coming in September 2010) will be guest-edited by Simon Rogerson and will feature five articles from Ethicomp 2010, held this past winter at Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain.

In this issue

This issue features the three retrospective pieces by Computers and Society editors Camille Dickson-Deane, Matthew North and myself.   We each chose an article that appeared in Computers and Society several years ago, and considered its current value and appeal in today’s increasingly more complicated technological world.  We also introduce in this issue a new feature entitled “Related organizations,” in which we highlight a group with which we have common goals and membership.  We invite you to contribute to this new column.  And, we continue to look for high quality submissions and solicit your ideas for new themes and article topics for our publication.  Please contact us with your suggestions and submissions.