ACM SIGGRAPH
Open Volunteer Positions

If you're interested in some area, but the exact thing you want to work on isn't below, please contact us anyway and ask about your idea! We can always use more ideas for programs.

Did you ever want to find out the name of the person who made that balloon guy short? Was there that time you wanted to point a friend to the great visualization tape you saw at the conference? Or you couldn't remember which company did that great CG commercial? ACM SIGGRAPH would like to set up a user-contributed database of computer-generated works of all forms. This database would be a important way for our members to be correctly credited with their work, as well as a resource for our community to find the information on works that had seen or wanted to see, and to know who made what works when.

We have several years' worth of records from the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival as a starting point, and also need to coordinate with the information available about the 137 issues of the SIGGRAPH Video Review, spanning the history of computer graphics. But, the long-term success of the database would depend on creating a simple and reliable way for members of the community to enter new information so that the database can grow over time.

Database Programmer
We are looking for one or more volunteers to help program the CG Database application. Once the database itself is set up, two important parts of the application will need to be created: the formatting and search system to make the contents available to the web-surfing public, and the data entry and editing system to enable both internal volunteers and external users to create and update entries in the database.
Volunteers should be familiar with developing database-backed web applications in a Linux/Unix environment, and able to contribute the application developed to ACM SIGGRAPH. We are able to support most standard web application paradigms, including PHP, Python, Tomcat/Java, and Perl; however, we do not run any commercial web application systems at this time. Please provide pointers to code samples and projects you've done before.
Contact: Director for Communications, Leo Hourvitz: hourvitz@siggraph.org
Posted: 2001.

Database Setup
Most importantly, we are looking for volunteers who can help with populating the database once set up. Initially, a volunteer who could handle importing the records for the last several years' worth of SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festivals can help us get the database off to a good start. We also would very much like to sync up the database with the catalog of the SIGGRAPH Video Review.
In addition, even if you can only spare the time to enter the works produced by your own company or institution -- maybe only this year -- we would appreciate a complete and accurate dump of the credits for the work. We anticipate capturing titles of the works, synopses, keywords, titles and names of all credited individuals who worked on it, roles and names of companies involved in creating the work, year of release, and applicable playdate information such as festivals or showings of particular note.
Volunteers should have a general knowledge of production and credit in computer-generated imagery; no other specialized knowledge is needed.
If you would like to make sure your work is represented in the database once it's set up, feel free to send a text file with the above information to Leo Hourvitz, ACM SIGGRAPH Director for Communications at hourvitz@siggraph.org. We'll keep it on file and try to find volunteer time to enter it into the database once it's up.
Contact: Director for Communications, Leo Hourvitz: hourvitz@siggraph.org
Posted: 2001.