ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee September 2003 Conference Call

Tony Baylis
Judy Brown
Colleen Case
Alain Chesnais
Gudrun Enger
Thierry Frey
Barb Helfer
Masa Inakage
Jacki Morie
Dino Schweitzer
Stephen Spencer

Absent
Erica Johnson

Motion (Brown, Helfer) To approve the minutes from both the August Executive Committee meeting and the August Executive Committee conference call.

Approved (8,0,0)
Note: Gudrun Enger and Stephen Spencer were not yet on the call when this vote was taken.

Allocation update

Alain Chesnais reported back from the SIG Governing Board (SGB) meeting. There is currently a shortfall of $240,000 in the allocation that ACM needs to collect from the SIGs, and smaller SIGs are having a difficult time meeting their $15,000 minimum requirement. Consequently, an SGB task force is looking at the allocation model again. A new proposal to lower the minimum amount from $15,000 to $10,000 and to raise the amount for the wealthier SIGs was approved by SGB. It will probably mean that ACM SIGGRAPH will pay $70,000 to $100,000 more each year.

There is a revenue stream to each SIG from downloads of that SIGs material in the digital library. However, we are currently only receiving $30,000 because downloads of our conference proceedings are counted as Transactions on Graphics downloads, rather than ACM SIGGRAPH downloads.

We were asked to co-sponsor a mentoring project proposed for SIG Discretionary Funds by the CRA-W, the Computer Research Association group that focuses on women in computing. We felt that the proposal did not address what some of us viewed as the main issues and that a project that only benefited a few students did not gain as much as other projects might. We are not in favor of support for this proposal.

The SIGGRAPH 2004 preliminary budget was approved by the ACM Executive Committee. The final budget will be approved in January, 2004, by ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee and then submitted to the ACM Executive Committee.

ACM SIGGRAPH will send two representatives to a conference on Plone, a system for manging web content. It is important to send two people because there will be some sessions for programmers and some sessions for designers.

A proposal by Brad de Graf to archive the SIGGRAPH Video Reviews online was discussed and will be discussed further at the October Executive Committee meeting. The following questions were raised:

* We have several archival projects going on. How do they fit together?

* Would it be better to have this in the ACM Digital Library?

* Who is going to gain the copyright permission to archive these SVRs?

Action Item: Alain Chesnais is to ask Brad de Graf to name the volunteer who will obtain the copyrights.