Summary

This is a proposal to establish a new membership category, an “Associate Member” for ACM SIGGRAPH. Every Member of an ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter would automatically become an Associate Member of ACM SIGGRAPH. The primary goal is to unify the Chapter and Organizational Membership.

Background

ACM SIGGRAPH has a large network of Associated Professional and Student Chapters. Most of the members of these chapters are not members of ACM SIGGRAPH and/or ACM. There is frequent confusion as to the difference between ACM SIGGRAPH membership and Chapter membership. People do not understand why they need to sign up for two different memberships and why membership in a Chapter does not mean they are a Member of ACM SIGGRAPH. There have been numerous discussions concerning this problem for over ten years and a number of suggestions as to how to unify the two sets of members. After discussion, the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee considers our current proposal to be the best solution to this problem.

Proposal

The proposal is to create a new category of membership, the "Associate Member". The primary purpose of this member category is to allow all ACM SIGGRAPH Chapters Members to automatically become ACM SIGGRAPH Associate Members. Associate Membership may also be offered to other classes of applicants.

Benefits

The Member benefits of ACM SIGGRAPH regular Members includes the following:

* E-Quarterly

* siggraph.org <http://siggraph.org> email alias

* CreativeHeads jobs list and services

* Voting rights in ACM SIGGRAPH Elections

* Discounts for all ACM SIGGRAPH merchandise, e. g., the SIGGRAPH Video Review, Conference Proceedings, etc.

* Registration Discounts for all conferences/workshops/symposia that are in-cooperation, co-sponsored, or sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH

* Access to all ACM SIGGRAPH related content in the ACM Digital Library

* Access to the captured content of SIGGRAPH Conferences in the SOMA Encore system


The Member benefits of ACM SIGGRAPH Associate Members includes the
following:

* E-Quarterly

* siggraph.org <http://siggraph.org> email alias

* CreativeHeads jobs list and services


As future benefits are developed the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee will decide if they will be provided to both categories of Membership or restricted to regular Members.

Dues

The annual dues of regular Members are $35/year and student Members are $27/year. The annual dues of the Associate Members will be 0$/year.

Impact

It is estimated that there are approximately 3 – 4,000 Chapters Members who are not currently ACM SIGGRAPH Members and who could become Associate Members. The addition of these new Members will have a negligible financial impact on ACM SIGGRAPH since they will only receive electronic services. It is assumed that the Associate Members will not be counted for SGB voting purposes.

Implementation and Challenges

To implement the goal of having all ACM SIGGRAPH Chapters Members become ACM SIGGRAPH Associate Members requires that we have accurate lists of the chapter's Members. This is a reporting requirement but has not been implemented in the past. One anecdotal reason is that some chapters and some Members do not want to release their Members contact information to ACM because they are concerned that this will put them on spam lists. We will advertise that this information will not be sold and will only be used to send the Associate Member's electronic benefits to the Members.

In some countries, e. g., Australia, there may be potential legal problems if the chapters send us a list of their Member's email addresses. To handle this situation we will try to get the chapters Members to voluntarily sign up online to get these benefits. We will make a form or a template that can be added to each chapter website where Members can voluntarily sign up for Associate ACM SIGGRAPH Membership. Then each chapter Chair can verify that these are in fact legitimate Members of their chapter.

In the future, something similar could be an option field on the ACM SIGGRAPH online Membership page where "Select Your Local Chapter" may be added to the form. This would connect chapter leaders with their potential constituents. We could make a page on chapters.siggraph.org <http://chapters.siggraph.org> with the same system and send the list to each respective chapter to verify.