Dear ACM SIGGRAPH Community,
It has been a while since my last post, as we have been extremely busy on the SIGGRAPH Executive Committee.
General Updates
First, I want to take this opportunity to also welcome our new Conference Advisory Group Chair, Erik Brunvand. This appointed position is a significant commitment, as the CAG Chair is responsible for leading the team that ensures the success of our annual SIGGRAPH conference. Which leads me to express my sincere gratitude to our outgoing CAG Chair, Mikki Rose. Mikki has been a member of the CAG for NINE years: the first three leading to her role as Conference Chair in 2019, and the last six years as Chair of the CAG. Mikki exemplifies the level of commitment we are fortunate to have within our community, and we are fortunate to have had her service.
Following my last post on SIGGRAPH Asia’s 2026 location, I wanted to summarize the final steps we have taken based on feedback from our entire community.
- We will be surveying our attendees about future conference locations. We will use this as an early indicator for our attendees, not only of interest but also of potential concerns about locations.
- We will share answers to the accessibility questions we solicited regarding transparency in future site selection. While there will always be trade-offs in our location choices, we believe this transparency was a key gap in our process, and we are committed to providing it going forward.
- We will not apply these guidelines to our specialized conferences. We provide minimal oversight of these conferences, allowing them to operate in ways that best serve their respective parts of our larger community. That said, all Specialized Conferences follow ACM guidelines and enforced by our Standing Committee Chair and liaisons to our Executive Committee.
November Executive Committee
Since my last post, we have held an intense and successful Executive Committee meeting (see below) and an incredibly successful SIGGRAPH Asia in Hong Kong, with over 6,000 attendees. Congratulations to SIGGRAPH Asia 2025’s conference leadership on an excellent experience!
We hosted this EC meeting in Chicago and at the Smithbucklin Offices to reduce our costs. I am very thankful to SB for hosting us. As mentioned, we accomplished a lot in two days of being locked in a conference room. It was a reminder of how valuable in-person experiences are for building community and why improving our site selection process is so important. Ensuring this community remains connected through our annual in-person conferences is essential to our organization’s health.
Details of our efforts are in our meeting notes, but I’ll summarize that our work was really divided into two main themes for the weekend:
- Mission. What is the mission of the EC, the Conference Advisory Groups, and the right levels of oversight for each? We’ve confirmed that the EC’s priorities are to provide benefits to the membership year-round and to ensure the organization’s long-term sustainability.
- Organizational Sustainability. Our organization depends on financial solvency and volunteership. Ensuring both were the focus of discussions ranging from the roles of Standing Committees, Advisory Boards, and Affinity Groups to multi-year expense control and revenue growth opportunities, to the officer structure for our organization.
This team of elected and appointed Executive Committee members has committed to doing the work to make us better, and you should expect to see some key changes before the end of my (too short) one-year term as the Chair of the organization.
Member Benefits
Since my last post, there has been some discontent raised around member benefits and accessibility under ACM Open. ACM Open has been discussed for quite some time as an exciting step toward making our community’s work more accessible. Years of planning and effort culminated in a launch on January 1st, much to the excitement of our community. Unfortunately, unexpected changes led to both private and public calls for change. I’m grateful that ACM listened to this feedback and made immediate corrections, ensuring that, by providing open access to all content, our paying membership was not disadvantaged.
You’ll note that member benefits are a key responsibility of the Executive Committee, but we had limited discussion of them in our last in-person meeting. What the organization can do to deliver greater value to our membership will be a primary focus of our meeting at the beginning of March. If you have suggestions, please feel free to share them with me at ec-chair@siggraph.org.
Speaking of our membership at large, I was fortunate to meet Ana and Felipe, the Chair and Vice Chair of our SIGGRAPH Bogota Chapter, while on vacation over the holidays. They gave me a valuable perspective that I lacked on what it’s like to be part of this community while so far away from our conference locations and centers of leadership. This, combined with meeting and speaking with many Asian Chapter leaders who attended SIGGRAPH Asia in Hong Kong, was a powerful reminder of the importance of our local chapters and further motivated me to focus on member benefits at the Executive Committee level. I am looking forward to sharing our commitments in my next update.
Sincerely,
Darin Grant
ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee Chair (1 Sept 2025 – 30 August 2026)