Announcing a Webzine on HCI
     CHIWeb Monthly

Call for Submissions

If you are a practically-minded person working in HCI, UI, or HF, (and you do not need to ask what those acronyms mean), CHIWeb Monthly wants you to submit a short article for publication at the ACM SIGCHI Web site. No submission will be considered too short or too long, and no topic is guaranteed acceptance or rejection. Submissions in HTML are preferred, but formats that can be easily converted will also be considered. Email negotiations before submission are not only encouraged, they are required. Send inquiries to: perlman@acm.org.

Call for Editors

If you would like to edit an issue or two, or become the editor, please contact the current editor.

Background

Two of the goals of the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC) are to: As the SIGCHI Vice-Chair for Publications, my conclusions from some SIGCHI market research were that people were not getting enough:
  1. timely information
  2. accessible information (e.g., Web)
  3. practical/useful information
ACM interactions magazine was cited as a source of useful information, but it is published every two months, and it is not a SIGCHI member benefit.

To provide a new member benefit, without a large startup or maintenance cost, Gary Perlman, the 1995-97 ACM SIGCHI Vice-Chair for Publications, proposed creating a timely, web-based, informal, practical publication for SIGCHI members. This would be a Track 2 publication to provide a bridge between practitioners and research scholars, as described in the ACM Electronic Publishing Plan. Some publications that come to mind that might be models for columns include:


CHIWeb Monthly: Fact Sheet

"ISSN" http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chiweb/
Interim Editor Gary Perlman
Frequency Monthly
Medium World-Wide Web
Length Each issue will be roughly equivalent to a 4-page newsletter (i.e., short enough that people will read it).
Subscriptions Free to SIGCHI Members (with possible public release later)
Copyright Policy Authors retain copyright to their work, and by submitting to CHIWeb Monthly, affirm that they have the right to and grant free permission to ACM to present their materials on the World-Wide Web.
Editorial Policy Informal articles for practitioners on such topics as:
  • design makeovers, with before and after screenshots (e.g., Darnell's Bad Designs http://www.baddesigns.com/)
  • tools and techniques, lessons learned in the trenches (e.g., How a screen-mounted rear-view mirror lets you see your users' faces while they test software.)
  • reviews of practitioner-oriented books, or maybe even ratings by readers
  • summaries of good mailing list/newsgroup discussions (e.g., utest discussions)
  • summaries of good web-sites (e.g., Ameritech Testtown at http://www.ameritech.com/news/testtown/)