Membership Changes
This is Part I of a two-part blog series on SIGCHI membership. Read Part II for the analysis of results from our recent Membership Survey by VP Membership Naomi Yamashita.
We are delighted to provide you with an update on the composition of the SIGCHI community — what the membership looks like today and how it has evolved in the past two years. As of May 2023, SIGCHI counts 4,555 members, a 57% increase since May 2021. We think this is great! We welcome our new members, and offer more information about the evolution of our membership below.
First, 56% of all current members joined our community less than a year ago (as opposed to 29% new members in 2021). Some of this rise is likely due to our conferences returning to in-person meeting formats. We have also undertaken efforts this year, thanks to support from ACM, to offer opt-in complimentary SIG memberships to ACM attendees new to SIGCHI, at several SIGCHI conferences, accounting for 27% of all new members in 2023 thus far. We are keen to have our membership grow to a better, more accurate reflection of our conference communities.
We now have 39% student members (increased from 21% in May 2021). This is a positive sign, since we have in fact been soliciting greater participation from students and early career professionals. We do not appear to have lost our loyal long-standing members either: 746 or 16% current members have been with us for 10 years or more, compared to 707 or 24% in 2021.
The number of SIG-only memberships has risen from 841 to 1615, a 92% increase. These are SIGCHI members who are not also ACM members. This may be due to expensive ACM membership fees; we have roughly halved ours as of July 2022. It may also be because SIGCHI membership benefits cover most of our members’ ACM needs.
Geographically, as well, there has been significant evolution. We now have representation from 86 countries, as opposed to 71 in 2021. Overall, 45% members are located in US/Canada (down from 50% in 2021), 33% in Europe (up from 28%), with little change in relative percentages across Asia (14%), Oceania (4%), Latin America (3%), and Africa (1%). We are glad to see Europe’s prominence grow, and will be working hard to grow our communities in other parts of the world as well. We (the SIGCHI EC) have already planned two critical outreach events to take place in Cape Town and Rio later this year (stay tuned!).
35 countries now have 15 or more members; this number was 29 in 2021. These new countries include Singapore, Portugal, South Africa, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Costa Rica. We love to see it and will look to support these communities further! Also, 35 countries have fewer than 5 members, compared to 30 in 2021. We will look deeper into how we can support the emergent HCI groups at these places.
The US currently has the highest number of SIGCHI members; this number was 1300 in 2021 and has increased by 530 in two years. The overall percentage of US members has gone from 45% in 2021 to 40%. Both are welcome changes — we are naturally glad to have many more members on board, and also excited that our membership is slowly and surely becoming more globally distributed.
Germany and UK continue to occupy the next two spots in member numbers, though they have swapped places, possibly due to CHI23 being held in Germany. Germany now stands at 364 members and UK at 347. In the last two years, UK’s membership has risen by 88% while Germany’s has more than doubled.
Of the remaining top ten, Canada increased its membership by 54% to 227. Japan’s membership rose by 33% to 166. Australia is now at 145, with an increase of 75%. India had a 33% rise to 111. Netherlands has just crossed 100 members, with a 57% increase. China is at 94 members, approx. 3X more than in 2021. Italy doubled its numbers and is now at 87.
Other countries that more than doubled their membership, to varying degrees, include the Republic of Korea, Austria, Taiwan, Sweden, Costa Rica, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Bangladesh, Iran, Slovenia, Ecuador, Czech Republic, Egypt, Ghana, the Russian Federation, and Slovakia. There were also drops in membership in a couple of countries and our volunteers are looking to address this further.
Overall, this is excellent news for our SIG, and we — the SIGCHI Executive Committee — will be focusing in coming months on onboarding our new members and making the benefits of SIGCHI membership more visible to them. We will, in addition, be responding to a survey of our current membership to gain a better understanding of where our efforts most needed to focus. Read our sequel to this post to learn more about our survey and what we learned about our membership from it.
