DOI: 10.1145/1831407.1831408
Alain Chesnais
It is a great honor to have been elected ACM
President. I must say it’s been an interesting
road to this juncture. My first ACM role was
volunteering to maintain the mailing list of
acm is Built on
Volunteers’ Shoulders
my local SIGGRAPH chapter in Paris in
the mid-1980s. Over the last 25 years, I
have continued to volunteer for many
different roles within the organization. I am proud to be the first French
citizen and the second European to
hold this position, as it clearly illustrates that ACM has become a truly international organization. I’m looking
forward to the day when we can look
back at this time as the beginning of
a long chain of volunteer leaders coming from countries throughout every
region of the world.
This organization is largely built
on the energy and devotion of many
dedicated volunteers. I’d like to
take this opportunity to share some
thoughts on the value of volunteering
at ACM. When you look at all of the
activities that make up the offerings
of our organization, it is amazing to
note that members who volunteer
their time to deliver the content we
provide do the vast majority of the
work. There are many opportunities
for members to step forward and
donate their time to the success of
ACM’s various endeavors.
I recently attended the annual SIG-
GRAPH conference in Los Angeles
where volunteer efforts are highly visi-
ble. With a multimillion-dollar budget,
it is by far the largest conference that
ACM sponsors, attracting tens of thou-
sands of attendees every year. Though
a conference of that size calls upon
many highly skilled professional con-
tractors to implement the vision of the
conference organizers, the content is
selected and organized by volunteers. I
encourage you to visit Communications’
Web site ( http://cacm.acm.org) to view
a dynamic visual representation of
how much work went into the prepa-
ration of the conference over a three-
year period. Created by Maria Isabel
Meirelles, of Northeastern University,
Boston, the series of graphs illustrate
how volunteer involvement increased
dramatically over the 40-month pre-
paratory period as we got closer to
the dates of the event. By the time the
conference took place a total of over
Alain Chesnais ( chesnais@acm.org) heads Visual
transitions, a toronto-based consulting company.
© 2010 acM 0001-0782/10/1000 $10.00
