Last year at CHI2017, we ran the #CHIversity campaign for the first time. This year, we’re going to be back! We’ve had a look at what worked and what didn’t work last year, and are hoping to make the campaign more accessible and bigger this year!

#CHIversity2018 is about inclusion, diversity, and feminist issues at CHI.

We are Fempower.tech: a collective of intersectional feminists working within HCI. Many of us are based at Open Lab and publish at CHI. CHI 2018 sees the return of our grassroots campaign, #CHIversity, which aims to celebrate inclusion at the conference, highlight issues where they occur, and to raise awareness and promote debates around research which might be seen as polarising.

We want to create an active space for diversity at CHI through the development of an alternative program of events to compliment the main CHI tracks: curating our “feminist CHI programme”, running craftivist activities (zine and quilt making!) and fostering connections between attendees who share our interests in feminisms, diversity, social justice, and related subjects. See for example our Feminist SIG, our alt.chi paper about last year’s campaign, or come to our #CHIversity launch on the evening of Monday April 23rd in Montreal (location TBD).

We would love for you to join us! Use the Twitter hashtag #CHIversity to tweet anything relating to feminisms and inclusion at CHI, follow us at @fempowertech, and see our website http://fempower.tech/ for more details of our events and feminist CHI program.

#CHIversity 2018 Activities:

We are starting our campaign much earlier this year, and through that are hoping to include some people that aren’t from Open Lab in the planning of it all. So, if you want to get involved with stuff we’re already planning or want to add something to our programme, please please please get in touch with Angelika (a.strohmayer@ncl.ac.uk)!!

Anyway, this year we are going to be running these:

Twitter: Similar to last year, we will be using #CHIversity to tweet about the positives and negatives of the conference, and hopefully will have some impact as we did last year (like getting gender neutral toilets installed!)

A Feminist CHI Programme: Once published, we will be going through the CHI programme again to pull out papers that address feminist issues that we think should be highlighted!

CHIversity Zine: Once again, we will host a zine-making sessions towards the end of the conference. We will bring along craft supplies and printed tweets to turn into a little zine to share our experiences of the conference. See last year’s result!

Collaborative Quilting: This year we will be supporting the wellbeing of attendants at CHI again through crafting. Instead of cross-stitching however, this year we will be making a quilt-top together! We will have little packets for people to work on throughout the conference with some instructions and helpful links. So get crafty, relax, and learn a new skill!

alt.chi paper presentation: We have published an alt.chi paper about last year’s campaign. This will take place on Thursday in the 9:00 session in Room 516D.

SIG: We are organising a Special Interest Group at CHI this year on Monday at 16:30 in room 514A, titled: ‘Feminist HCI: Taking Stock, Moving Forward, and Engaging Community’

We are also reaching out to some of the existing diversity campaigns and are already in contact with some of the diversity chairs of the conference.