🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi Clay - long time no see! Old Chapter (er..excude me...Professional
Chapters of Local Activites) people never die - not sure what we do, tho...
I agree entirely with Clay's comments (deleted here in interest of space
and bandwidth). What I'm seeing from Local Activities is a serious lack
of communication with its constituency. The Big Event at CSC is fine, but
only addresses a small number of people. With the serious economic problems
few people can manage to attend a conference that is not related to the
current work. Most people involved with local SIGs and Chapters are not
drawn to CSC - yet all the effort is being focussed there. What happened
to the Workshops of old? This was a viable program that brought many of the
leadership issues to other venues. 

I realize that conducting a Big Event outside CSC is time-consuming and expensive
but let's try a subset. For example, at SIGGRAPH 92 this year there were 22 (?)
local SIGGRAPHs representing, including ALL the Canadian groups, France,
Bulgaria, etc as well as most of the US groups. How about a workshop or
mini-Big Event to support these people? If we start now, we could probably
get it together by next August in Anaheim for SIGGRAPH 93. 

It is the chapters/sigs responsibility to get help from ACM HQ but all too
often no one knows what is available. Again, we get back to the issue of
communication. Yes, acm.org is going to help, but that is 6-12 months away
and the other resources are ALREADY in place and have been for many years -
resources and programs like Lectureship, Workshops, PDS (altho at the moment
Seminars officially belong to the Ed Board). We need more information about
programs and resources that help us now!

Blanche Cohen
(like Clay, I've been doing this too long - reference available on request)
University of Denver
Spending the summer at Jet Propulsion Lab