HCI Organizations and Mailing Lists

ACM interactions, Volume 2, No. 4, pp. 7-9.

Gary Perlman, Ohio State University

The most relevant links are listed under Organizations and Mail

Table of Contents

Introduction

The is the sixth (and final) installment on resources on HCI. The previous installments:
  1. WWW (World-Wide Web)
  2. FAQs and Newsgroups
  3. Standards and Guidelines
  4. Education
  5. Bibliographies
and this one on Organizations and Mailing Lists are all available from the ACM interactions Magazine HCI Resources columns page at http://www.acm.org/~perlman/interactions/resources.html. I have enjoyed gathering the material over the past 18 months, and I hope it has been useful to you.

This installment is on the organizations of individuals who have created most of the resources, and one medium they use to communicate: mailing lists. Using the information in this column, you will be able to contact literally thousands of people in industry, education, and government who are interested in HCI, and the hundreds of people who volunteer their time to create the world-wide HCI community. I have included information on organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, in an effort to expand the international exchange of ideas.

In addition to organizations and mailing lists described here, you can get information on individuals at Keith Instone's WWW Virtual Library HCI Page on people at http://www.cs.bgsu.edu/HCI/bin/people and in the reports in HCI Education Survey at http://www.acm.org/sigchi/educhi/#reports.

The information in this column is uneven because different organizations have different priorities. Some organizations have WWW pages, ftp directories, gopher servers, and mailing lists, while others have a minimal or growing internet presence. Many organizations sponsor conferences and publish journals and other serials, but these are outside the scope of this column (the interested reader is directed to the previous column on bibliographies on HCI).

A Warning about Mailing Lists: This column contains information that can be misused. Some common unintentional and intentional misuses are:

and there are many more ways to inflame the inhabitants of the net. (Ironically, in testing the links for this column, I sent a request to be added to a list to the list instead of to the list maintainer. Everyone makes mistakes.) It is probably best to read mailing list subscription information carefully, and then lurk as a newbie for a while before posting. Keeping a sense of humor about the situation is also useful; some people are amused to see posting to thousands of people with content like "I'd like that too!". Arlene Rinaldi has compiled a page on network etiquette; her netiquette page is available at: http://www.fau.edu/rinaldi/netiquette.html.

ACM SIGCHI

The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI, pronounced SIG-KIGH>) is the largest organization dedicated to human factors in computing with about 7000 members. SIGCHI has a home page at http://www.acm.org/sigchi/, and you can get information about joining ACM SIGCHI from the ACM home page at http://www.acm.org or by sending email to: acmhelp@acm.org.

SIGCHI has many mailing lists on a variety of topics. Until 1997, they were managed through Xerox (xerox.com) as a service to SIGCHI, but they are now at acm.org.

Here are some of the more popular SIGCHI mailing lists. Unless otherwise indicated, to subscribe or unsubscribe to a mailing list, send email to listserv@acm.org. In the body of your message, include whether you wish to be subscribed or unsubscribed, the mailing list name, and your full name (the acm listserv will get your email address from the mail header). Some examples:

subscribe to a couple of lists
subscribe chi-publications Gary Perlman
subscribe chi-announcements Gary Perlman
unsubscribe from a list
unsubscribe chi-announcements
see who is on a list
review chi-educators
If you have problems with any of the following lists, send mail to the associated list request address listname-request@acm.org not the whole list, which might have hundreds of subscribers. For example, if you can't get off of chi-announcements send mail to chi-announcements-request@acm.org.
Non-commercial messages of general interest:
chi-Announcements@acm.org
Topics on HCI Education:
chi-Educators@ACM.ORG
Topics on Intelligent Interfaces:
chi-II@acm.org
Cross-cultural issues:
chi-Intercultural@acm.org
Future directions of SIGCHI publications:
chi-Publications@acm.org
Special Interest Area (SIA) on Social Issues:
chi-Social-Action@acm.org
Student issues and announcements:
chi-Students@acm.org
Future directions of SIGCHI:
chi-Vision@acm.org

HFES CSTG

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) is a professional society of about 5000 individuals interested in making technology (not just computers) more usable by and useful for people. The Computer Systems Technical Group (CSTG) is the largest of the 18 HFES technical groups with about 1000 members, many of whom are also members of ACM SIGCHI. A WWW page for the HFES is planned at (or near) http://www.hfes.vt.edu/HFES/, and you can get information about joining the CSTG by sending mail to the HFES at 72133.1474@compuserve.com.

The HFES has a few mailing lists, and the one most relevant to HCI is the CSTG-L mailing list. To get onto CSTG-L, send commands to its listserv. All the commands listed below should be formatted as a single line in the body of an email message sent to: listserv@vtvm1.cc.vt.edu (the character after vtvm is the numeral "one").

Subscribing to the list:
subscribe CSTG-L Firstname Lastname
Unsubscribing from the list:
unsubscribe CSTG-L
Get more information:
help
Get a reference card:
info refcard
If things get really confused, you can send a message to the CSTG-L mailing list owner: CSTG-L-request@vtvm1.cc.vt.edu. Other lists at this listserv include the COMMS-L list for the HFES Communications Technical Group and the VISUAL-L mailing list serving the members of the Visual Design Special Interest Area (SIA) of ACM SIGCHI. To subscribe to them, follow the instructions for CSTG-L, substituting COMMS-L or VISUAL-L for CSTG-L.

UPA and UTEST

The Usability Professionals Association (UPA), an association concerned with the usability of computer software, has grown from grass roots support for a practical approach to usability. It can be contacted at its email address: upadallas@aol.com. The UPA web site is at: http://www.upassoc.org/.

The UTEST mailing list informally serves both the UPA and the Society for Technical Communication (STC) (which has a home page at http://stc.org/). UTEST is an active list of over 600 people interested in usability testing. To send mail to the list, messages should be addressed to: UTEST@hubcap.clemson.edu. There is more information on the UTEST list available at http://tigger.clemson.edu/utest. To get onto UTEST, send commands to its listserv. All the commands listed below should be formatted as a single line in the body of an email message sent to: LISTPROC@hubcap.clemson.edu

Subscribing to the list:
subscribe utest Firstname Lastname
Unsubscribing from the list:
unsubscribe utest (signoff also works)
Getting copies of your own messages:
set utest mail ack
If you need help with the above, you might contact the list manager, Tharon Howard, at tharon@hubcap.clemson.edu.

ASD

The Association for Software Design (ASD) is interested in promoting good software design. ASD has a home page at http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/asd. ASD has a mailing list of about 150 people, asd-discuss@pcd.stanford.edu, which you can join by sending a request to asd-discuss-request@pcd.stanford.edu or by sending a subscribe command to majordomo@pcd.stanford.edu.
Subscribing to the list:
subscribe asd-discuss
Unsubscribing from the list:
unsubscribe asd-discuss
The subscribe command does not require (or allow) a first and last name; optionally, you can supply an email address other than the one you are subscribing from.

BCS HCI

The British HCI Group is part of the British Computer Society and is the largest HCI organization in the United Kingdom. The HCI Group has a home page at http://www.bcs.org.uk/hci/. You can join the HCI Group or get other information via email to hci@bcs.org.uk.

The British HCI Group electronic news service is used for announcements of relevant UK and international conferences, workshops, jobs and other resources. To receive British HCI Group news, send commands to: mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk

Join the list:
join bcs-hci first-name last-name
stop
Leave the list:
leave bcs-hci
stop
All news/queries should be sent to bcs-hci-request@mailbase.ac.uk

ESA CHISIG

The Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG, pronounced with CHI as in chives) is part of the Ergonomics Society of Australia (ESA). chisig@csse.swin.edu.au is a mailing list for the Australian HCI community. To get onto the mailing list, send messages to its listserv: listserv@csse.swin.edu.au
To subscribe to CHISIG:
subscribe chisig@csse.swin.edu.au Firstname Lastname
To unsubscribe:
unsubscribe chisig@csse.swin.edu.au
You will then receive an acknowledgment from the listserver. If there are any problems contact Steve Howard at steve@csse.swin.edu.au.

Other Organizations

There are other organizations with interests in HCI, only some of which are listed here.
European Association for Cognitive Ergonomics (EACE)
WWW pages and internet site are under construction. Contact (Elly Lammers) for listserver information: elly@cs.vu.nl
IEEE Computer Society
http://www.computer.org/
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR)
http://www.cpsr.org/dox/home.html
International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)
Information on IFIP Technical Committee 13 (HCI) is at: http://www.dit.upm.es/~cdk/org/ifip/tcs.html
International Ergonomics Association (IEA)
http://turva.me.tut.fi/iea97/iea.html
International Standards Organization (ISO)
Technical committee 159 covers ergonomics, and the catalogue contains information about ISO 9241: Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDTs) http://www.iso.ch/welcome.html

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