Making minds meet in your local chapter: the case of SIGCHI.NL

SIGCHI.NL, the local chapter of SIGCHI in the Netherlands, decided at its first conference in January 1998 that most, if not all, communication to and between members should take place electronically. This also meant that the website should play a vital role in supporting the local HCI community in Holland. The newly appointed website committee was given the tough job of building the 'perfect' website for an opiniated audience of 500 usability experts.The website committee soon learned that in this case 'designing by committee' didn't prove effective enough. A 'surgical team' of two members was formed, joined by a member of the board to generate enough momentum to build the site in just a few months time.Despite the fact that the site had to be designed and built in the scarce free hours of its members, the surgical team managed to introduce the new website at the second SIGCHI.NL conference on September 7^th, 1998.The website (http://sigchi.nl) was well received by the members and is visited by approximately 40 people per day with only mouth-to-mouth (or better: mail-to-mail) promotion.Here is what we feel worked good when we designed and built the website• Rapid (online) prototyping to quickly get feedback from all of the committees of SIGCHI.NL• The surgical team did the 'cutting' while other members gave comments and support• Community support = adding 'real' interactivity to a website• Frequent updates: at this moment 4-6 updates a monthSoon to be introduced are password-protected area's for internal reports and documentation and a password-protected update system, where committees can change pages when necessary, meanwhile enforcing the necessary layout and navigational guidelines.