As many of you know, I have felt for
years that SIGGRAPH should be working to change their approach in a
number of areas. (See, for example, this or this.)
And although I had good email dialogs
with the chair of last year's SIGGRAPH, I have basically gotten
nowhere in having any kind of a discussion with those who run SIGGRAPH, and of course I have had no influence on their policies (except for maybe one, and even in that case I doubt it was because of my efforts).
So when a notice went out encouraging
people to run for the Executive Council of SIGGRAPH, as member at
large, I nominated myself. I was interviewed by five people at
SIGGRAPH who represented the Nominations Committee. There were a
number of interesting questions and most of the committee seemed to
have an open mind on the issue of whether I would be permitted to run for the EC. Although I was surprised by the
interview, nevertheless I was flattered that they would take the time
out from their busy schedule to meet with me.
Anyway, I was notified that they had
very strong candidates this year and that they were not putting me on
the ballot. This is what I expected.
As I also expected, there was no hint
of how else I might contribute to national SIGGRAPH. It seems to be
a club to which you need to be invited, not apply.
There are several possible responses to
this. I could wait until next year and nominate myself again, and
see what happens. I could try to find another way to participate
with national SIGGRAPH, but that has never worked so far. Or third,
I could run a "Write In" campaign to get myself added to
the ballot. To do that successfully, I would need to get 1% of the
membership of SIGGRAPH to sign a petition to nominate me.
It seems to me that 1% of the
membership is a very reasonable number, and that possibly I could get
that many if friends at a few facilities were to help facilitate that
(e.g. put up petitions at Pixar, Sony, DD, ILM, etc. ). On the other hand, I am severely under resourced and seem to have a lot of trouble just getting up in the morning let alone fighting powers that ought to be grateful for my contrbutions, imho.
The question is whether I should attempt this. If I do, the time frame is November and December for the write-in campaign to be
considered for the fall ballot. I can not do it if I do not have support, so please let me know what you think by comments here or email. In the mean time I will write a position paper on "where I stand" although one could probably deduce that from what is already written and posted on this blog.
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