Awards Discussions at the SIGCHI Futures Summit
Charting a future with our awards program.
Awards was one of the big topics of discussion at the recently organized ACM SIGCHI Futures Summit in Milan, Italy. We held two sessions on the topic: a plenary on Day 2 and a breakout on Day 3. Both sessions were highly informative for both me as well as, I believe, the more than 150 summit participants — all current and former general and paper chairs, steering committee members, and SIGCHI members with an interest in the organization and its 26 conferences. In writing this blog post, then, I decided to focus on insights, some of which are my own, and some which I believe were more or less surprising to many in the summit audience.
Insight 1: Awards Chart the Future
What are awards, anyway, and why do we give them? To me and to many of my SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC) colleagues, awards chart the future by recognizing work that we want to lift up and recognize. Yes, getting a paper accepted to one of our conferences is an achievement in itself, but awards take this a step further by identifying exemplars that we think show the way to where we want our conferences to go.
Insight 2: Awards are Hard
Here is something I have learned myself after only a little more than three months on the job: everyone has an opinion about awards. And this is for good reason. If an award says something about what we value as a community, then we want to make sure that we agree with the message. In particular, we must ensure that we do not recognize bad behavior. During the plenary awards session at the summit, Karrie Karahalios (CSCW steering committee chair) shared her experience in navigating scenarios where paper awards could potentially end up recognizing convicted sexual offenders. To still recognize survivors and avoid re-victimizing them, her proposed solution is to award selected co-authors rather than the paper itself. This is a useful teaching that could help our conference communities if they ever run into a similar situation.
Insight 3: SIGCHI Runs Six Central Awards
There are six SIG-level awards given out by the SIGCHI EC: the lifetime research, service, and practice awards (LRA, LSA, and LPA); the societal impact award; the SIGCHI Academy; and the outstanding dissertation award. I perceived a certain sense of surprise from the summit audience in giving this overview. I suspect that most SIGCHI members know about the awards, at least in a highly philosophical sense, but perhaps they were not aware of how much emphasis our awards currently place on very senior people (three out of six awards are for lifetime achievements). I hope that this overview will give SIGCHI members incentive to both nominate their colleagues for these central awards, as well as propose new awards, perhaps those aimed at early and mid-career individuals as well as for more diverse contributions beyond research.
Insight 4: ACM has a Process for Creating and Modifying Awards
ACM recently completed a significant overhaul of its award processes. Some of our conferences had not been able to make any awards changes while this much-needed overhaul was ongoing. At the time of writing, the overhaul has been completed and the ACM has published a revised process for both creating new awards as well as modifying old ones. At least one of our conferences has been successful in submitting a proposal using the new process and is now awaiting a response from the ACM SIG Governing Board (SGB) Awards committee.
Insight 5: ACM Award Review is Not Painful
Best paper awards are very common for the ACM and will receive a pro forma approval provided some basic requirements (listed in the guide) are met. One worthwhile activity identified at the Summit would be to assemble a taxonomy of common award types bestowed by our conferences and a list of example proposals for each type. This could help conferences to more easily propose new awards by building on successful examples. As always, the answer is often “process”. While the ACM review can take up to a couple of weeks, it is rapidly becoming standardized.
Insight 6: Existing Awards should be Reviewed, Too
It should be noted that existing awards given by our conferences are all subject to review and approval by the ACM SGB Awards committee. In the slightly longer term, the EC will pursue a rolling review of the awards programs for each of our conferences. While this may sound onerous, it does bring benefits: the CSCW example with sexual harassment may not have been identified were it not for the ACM process requiring all individuals selected for an award to be checked against the ACM Sanctions Database.
Insight 7: The ACM Sanctions Database is a Thing
It turns out that the ACM Sanctions Database, despite being discussed in a relatively recent SIGCHI blog post, was mostly unknown to many of the summit attendees. All I can say is to encourage you all to read about the database and how it is used for volunteering, reviewing, and awards throughout ACM.
Insight 8: Recognitions Can Be Useful
The ACM has a very clear definition of what an “award” is; put simply, if you are bestowing an award in an ACM conference, you will need to follow the award approval process to create it. If you need to give a one-off award for a paper, individual, or effort, the answer may be a “special recognition”. These are not standardized by the ACM and can come in handy for certain situations.
Insight 9: Award Nominations are Not Diverse
An issue that I came to the summit with a clear intention to discuss, but which ended up not being a central discussion point (perhaps because it is so difficult), is the problem of lack of diversity in our award nominations. While it is only this year I have the global view as the SIGCHI Adjunct Chair for Awards, it is clear that the absolute majority of nominations (75–80%) — both this year and in past years — come from North America and Europe, and among these, the United States is vastly overrepresented. I am happy to take ideas on how to broaden the diversity of our awards program. Some of the initiatives I am thinking about include institutional or departmental quotas for awards, nomination mentoring programs, and various ways of asking our existing awardees and nominators to help improve the diversity of the pool.
Conclusion and Next Steps
The ACM SIGCHI Futures Summit 2024 was very helpful for me in my new role as AC for Awards, and I hope that the event also led to some new insights for the attendees. While the SIGCHI Awards program is presently mostly concerned with finalizing the 2024 awards cycle (official announcements should be out later this week), the summit generated a long list of longer-term ideas and initiatives for me to pursue. Regardless of whether you attended the summit or not, I encourage you to reach out if you are interested in getting involved in the awards program in the future.
