Agenda

1. Apologies
2. Reports
3. Election of Officers (Chair, Secretary, Treasurer)
4. AOCB

Reports

Chair: Russell Beale

Essentially – business as usual.

Firstly, thanks to Andy Dearden, who is stepping down from the Communications role – under his stewardship this has grown hugely, encompassing as it did internal, membership, and external comms, including the oversight of the teams that produce usabilitynews and interfaces, both significant in themselves.

Ongoing changes at the BCS mean we have been adapting to these and identifying new synergies and working through teething problems.

The conference has been under review and some changes introduced for this year, and more planned for next, to ensure it retains its quality but becomes more relevant to the participants and wider HCI community.

COG has recently agreed a restructuring that affects the way that we view, and manage, the group’s activities. It has essentially been refocused on supporting key groups: academic, education, practitioner, public – and each of these will have a representative person. The group supports these cohorts through its products and services: the conference, Interfaces, UsabilityNews, the website, and so on. We have defined a PR/marketing role, and will be looking to engage even more with the public: if you are particularly interested in working with us on some media issues, both reactively and proactively, then please get in touch with me. The aim of these changes is to clarify who is responsible for what, and to ensure that we are able to understand and meet the needs of the groups we aim to represent and support. And given the changes in the BCS structures, we may well soon have very many more members and this gives us the opportunity, and the responsibility, of pushing HCI ever more widely.

Treasurer: Tom McEwan

Income and Expenditure 2007-8

In the end of year accounts from BCS (to 30/4/08), our folio shows a subsidy from BCS of £9893. In actual fact this should be £19,893 as there was no £10k conference float paid out during the year, and henceforth conference floats will not appear in these accounts.
These accounts are also the first year in which we are shown as a folio within BCS, and are measured against a budget – though in this first instance no fixed budget was recorded.

This was also the last year in which we would show income from membership fees, as SG membership is now free, albeit restricted to members of BCS (whose minimum membership is roughly comparable to our old membership fee).

All of this reflects the new reality – that we are not an automonous organisation but rather a subsection of a charity, responsible for raising funds for the charity through our events, publications etc, and spending charitable money on behalf of the trustees in pursuit of BCS’s charitable objectives.

Our two most effective publications, but also our main items of expenditure, are Usability News and Interfaces. These are both highly regarded, popular with our members but also help us reach beyond the SG membership into the wider BCS membership and the public as a whole. Both channels inform and educate about good practice in IT and therefore are wholly consistent with the charitable objectives. But the total cost of both is over £25k per annum so we should never assume that the BCS will continue to fund this, so we need to ensure that their high reputation continues and that we continually gather evidence that confirms this. Other groups and other parts of BCS may come up with better cases for funding.
Our case is helped by the £5k or so that the annual conference raises most years, and the £2-3k revenue we generate from advertising/sponsorship.

Budget 2008-9

We were required to submit this in January 2008. This coincided with the end of several months when circumstances prevented me from carrying out the treasurer’s duties. However we have had a budget comparable to last year’s approved.
We will need to plan our meetings much further in advance and take advantage of advance tickets as a result, which in turn reduces volunteer flexibility. The alternative will be to use virtual meetings more.

Budget 2009-10

We simply do not know how our proposed budget will be received in January. As an example BCS branches have seen a 25% reduction in their budgets. SG budgets might be diverted to national initiatives.
We propose to keep the editing and hosting of UN and production of Interfaces, outside of BCS for now, although we have had meetings with BCS Publications with a view to making more use of their capabilities. In the short term, hosting ought to be easily migrated with no loss of service, but the expenditure on our UN Editor and Interfaces Production Editor also brings us vital expertise in HCI and thus far production by BCS Publications would appear to reduce the value and effectiveness of our publications. But we are spending charitable donations on these two roles and will need constantly to justify this. We can bolster this argument by getting sponsorship and advertising income.

Committee members expenses have gone up in recent years and this appears to be due to reduced availability of cheap rail-tickets and increases in tax and fuel surcharges where air travel is needed. We are reaching the point where meetings of both COG and the subgroups will add up to a higher admin spend per member than other SGs. We also have more European involvement.
Event income is important to justify other expenditure, but we are not in the business of trying to create profitable conferences and workshops – our aim should be to achieve small surpluses that allow us to carry on coordination and organisational support, and which can part-fund our publications.

Membership: Janet Read

Change to BCS members only, free membership. Mailing to go to all BCS members to encourage wider membership of BCS (RB).

Education & Practice: William Wong

(1) HCIEd 2008, 2-4 April 2008, Rome -- jointly organised between BCS Interaction Education and Practice, and IFIP TC13.1 HCI Education, and IaD School, Tor Vergata University, Rome. What was once a twice a year workshop, is now an annual international conference. This year the attendance was about 40 attendees, with participants coming from the US, Canada, and mostly Europe. After three consecutive years of the conference being outside of the UK, in 2009, HCIEd will return to the UK. It will be hosted by University of Dundee Abertay's School of Computng and Creative Technologies, on 22-24 Apr 2009. It was decided by the COG that as of 2009, HCIEd will be held alternate years in the UK and overseas, emphasising its BCS roots and IFIP connection.

(2) CREATE 2008, 24-25 June 2008, London -- jointly initiated with Ergonomics Society HCI SG in 2007, continues to run and drew a larger attendance 50+ this year. It provides a forum to discuss the creation of interface designs and their ideas, in the anticipation that it will lead to further ideas.

(3) NDM9, 23-26 June 2009 -- jointly organised with the NDM community, this year, the Naturalistic Decision Making conference will feature the theme "NDM and Computers", exploring the role of computing technology in decision making and in decision making research.

Communications

UsabilityNews continues to go from strength to strength, reaching an international audience. Interfaces is being redesigned to fit the new brand. Group members are doing more and more media work, and the new structure will develop this. The group has responded to government and other consultations on a range of issues, from funding for research to SFIA.