Laurie Fox and Dan Herrick recently travelled to Chicago to attend an ACM SIG Governing Board (SGB) meeting focused on planning and sponsoring a single annual conference. SGB leadership invited a group of SIG and conference leaders to discuss issues related to smaller conferences like ours.

The meeting agenda included:

• ACM Publications Board presentation
• Disability Inclusion Discussion
• SIG / Conference Interactions and Associations
• Best Practice Sharing
  • SIG Programs
  • Conference Practices

We always enjoy sharing the best practices of SIGUCCS and the SIGUCCS Conference. Here are the items we shared with other SIG leaders:

• SIGUCCS Programs
  • Professional Development (Mentoring Program, Webinars, Subsidized Pre-Conference Seminars)
  • Community Engagement (Marketing, Travel Grants, Book Club, Listserv/Slack/Social Media)
  • Community Recognition (Communication Awards)
• SIGUCCS Conference Practices
  • Lightning Talks as a presentation format
  • Conference planning procedures & documentation
  • Generating post-conference webinars with popular conference presentations

The meeting attendees were most impressed with our webinar series and our marketing / community engagement efforts. Our biggest takeaways are ideas to improve our disability inclusion efforts at future conferences. We were fortunate to spend time learning from other leaders (and with each other)!