Message from the president

Abstract

Welcome to the first edition of our new E-Quarterly. The volunteers in ACM SIGGRAPH have been quite busy the past several months and I would like to give you a brief progress report on our activities. We have put in a large amount of effort on the new website. It is based on Plone, which is an Open Source Content management system. We plan to offer expanded member services with this system.We have formed a new Digital Arts Committee (DAC), Chaired by Masa Inakage. They are working on a new SIGGRAPH Arts site to help better support the digital artists in our community. This site is currently in beta test and should go live within a few weeks.We have passed two new policies to enable better support for our small conferences. One policy reduces the costs and the other allows for succeeding conferences to use some of the profit from previous conferences. We want to significantly increase the number of small conferences and especially those that are co-located with the annual SIGGRAPH Conference. If you are interested in putting on a small conference please contact our Vice-President, Alyn Rockwood (rockwood (at) siggraph.org) or the Small Conference Coordinator Scott Lang (scott_lang (at) siggraph.org).This past year we have moved the International Resources Program (IRP) and Committee from a SIGGRAPH Conference Program to an ACM SIGGRAPH Program. This program is under the Vice President who has appointed Kirsten Cater as the IRP Chair. One objective of this transition is to engender more year round activities. Suggestions can be sent to Alyn or Kirsten (kirsten_cater (at) siggraph.org).Another major effort this year has been in strategic planning. We had an expanded meeting in January that included the Executive Committee (EC), the Conference Advisory Group and several members of the ACM SIGGRAPH Advisory Board. This resulted in the formation of three working groups: 1. the structure of the annual SIGGRAPH conference, lead by Rob Cook, 2. member programs and benefits, lead by Mk Haley, and 3.) the structure of ACM SIGGRAPH, lead by Tony Baylis. At the March EC meeting there was more discussion and this was followed by much email discussion. Most of the upcoming June EC meeting will be devoted to this topic. We plan to have draft plans by SIGGRAPH 2006 so we can solicit feedback from our members.I welcome any comments or suggestions so please email me at owen (at) siggraph.org.