SIGPC V7N7: SIGDOC 2003

The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is known as the first society of computing, and is the preeminent academic organization for the computer sciences. SIGDOC is ACM's Special Interest Group on Design of Communication. It is a society of researchers and practitioners drawn from diverse disciplines, such as computer science, graphical arts, human factors, software engineering, and technical writing. Members include those who create program documentation in the computing community, and those who use computers to design communication artifacts in many styles and mediums.

I am fortunate to serve as the current President of ACM SIGDOC, and as such I was extremely pleased with the SIGDOC 2003 conference that took place October 12-15, 2003 in San Francisco, CA. Like many other conferences and workshops these days, attendance figures were down somewhat from previous years. However, I thoroughly enjoyed SIGDOC 2003. The program was exceptional and the participants were enthusiastic, which led to many lively and valuable technical interchanges throughout the week.

The success of SIGDOC 2003 is due in large part to the efforts of the General Chair, Susan Jones of MIT, and the Program Chair, David Novick of the University of Texas at El Paso. They both worked tirelessly for over a year to make the conference such a wonderful event. For anyone who has ever taken on such a task in the past, you know how much work is involved behind the scenes to make sure things go as smoothly as possible.

The conference hotel was right in San Francisco's wonderful Chinatown. This meant that literally just across the street was an incredible amount of excellent Chinese food suitable for all tastes. The Local Arrangements Chair, Channing Hughes, was instrumental in making us feel welcome in his home town. The location definitely helped create a social ambiance that supported the collegial atmosphere of all SIGDOC conferences.

Conference Program

The theme of SIGDOC 2003 was "Finding Real-World Solutions for Documentation," with a focus on exploring how theory informs practice and practice informs theory. The following description of SIGDOC 2003 is taken from the Welcome section of the conference proceedings:

SIGDOC continues conversations from years past that evoke our deep concerns with understanding users and their needs, seeking and creating technical solutions to make our work easier, learning new ways to work better in teams. We have stories from the field and theory from the academy. The conference provides a venue for the stories and the theories to improve each other. In the broad field of design of communication, the circle of experience, abstraction, testing and use can be completed in both directions.

Advancing the state of the art (and the state of the practice) in communication design can best be accomplished through a partnership between theorists and practitioners. Helping foster such partnerships is one of the main goals of SIGDOC.

The conference theme was echoed in many of the papers that were part of the technical program. Presentations were clustered according to the following topics:

The conference proceedings were published by ACM Press. Full details of the papers included in the technical program are available here.

Special Awards

Each year, SIGDOC gives out two special awards for prolonged and substantial contribution to the field. The first award, for individual contribution, is called the Rigo award. The second award, for institutional contribution, is called the Diana award.

At SIGDOC 2003, the Rigo award was presented to JoAnn Hackos of Comtech Services, Inc. Dr. Hackos gave an fascinating keynote speech, addressing the very timely topic of outsourcing of increasingly advanced work to offshore service providers. Interestingly, one of the methods she advocated to stave off the loss of jobs due to outsourcing was the adoption of a more engineering approach to technical documentation. Coincidentally, this is the central theme of the SIGDOC 2004 conference (see below).

The winner of the Diana award for 2003 was IBM Corporation. The award was accepted by Susan Mills, Director of Corporate User Technologies at IBM. During her presentation, Ms. Mills summarized some of the seminal contributions that IBM has made to technical documentation over the years. For example, the development of GML (a precursor to XML), supporting John Carroll's work on minimalism, and recent innovation in the area of document repurposing via DITA XML.

Looking Ahead to SIGDOC 2004

The next SIGDOC conference is already into the Call for Papers stage. SIGDOC 2004 will be held October 10-13, 2004 in Memphis, TN. The General Chair for SIGDOC 2004 is Johndan Johnson-Eilola of Clarkson University, and the Program Chair is Shihong Huang of the University of California, Riverside. The theme for SIGDOC 2004 is "The Engineering of Quality Documentation."

If you'd like to get involved SIGDOC 2004, please let us know. If SIGDOC 2004 is anything like SIGDOC 2003, you'll learn a lot, meet a lot of interesting people, and have a lot of fun!