[Sighci-l] suggestions

[Murray Turoff]

I joined ASIS in the late 60's and IR was a secondary but strong
interest.  I appreciated some of the early work in HCI and some of the
excellent review articles done in the annual volumes of sort of state of
the art review.  Since my own area then and over the years has been the
design of Computer Mediated Communications Systems which tends to be a
generator of large amounts of text there is a clear overlap of
interest.  One of our new faculty in our new Information Systems
department is doing some great work in automatic indexing and I have
talked her into applying it to the transcripts of some of our distance
learning courses and the results are quite interesting.  If I can
recover from being a new chair and the chaos in New Jersey with budget
cut backs and the "MERGER" or "RESTRUCTURING" (those two words indicate
the wide ambiguity in what we are having to deal with) there might be
some interesting papers in that area.

In any case I would like to see more of the early spirit of those state
of the art reviews in some HCI group.  I am afraid that while ACM SIGHCI
is certainly exciting and has a strong industry following, I find there
is a lot of rediscovery there under new jargon forced by vendor attempts
to put old wine in new bottles.

How big a group of people is this mailing list and I would think if this
SIG really wants to be come more cohesive and form more of a research
community or invisible college we should move to a true group
communication system and we would need some volunteers willing to act as
active facilitators of particular conferences on particular topics of
interest to small groups of 20 or so.  Does some one want to design a
simple survey and collect it with requests for topics they would be
interested in an on going dialogue and what they feel would be critical
mass and who is interested in taking leadership roles on given topics
which is going to be some regular investment in time.  It would be a
good role for a young enthusiastic researcher in the given topic and
might have an objective of building some sort of collaborative state of
the art and review of challenges in research type document.

Staying with the mailing list is fine and can serve for information
pooling and relevant announcements but it will not build a real
community.