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Our History

The inspiration for CHI*Atlanta came from the 1997 CHI Conference "Looking to the Future," which was held in Atlanta. Richard Anderson, who was the SIGCHI Local SIGs Chair at the time, recognized that Atlanta did not have an active local chapter. He had the great idea of hosting a signup list for people interested in forming a chapter. When the conference was over, Richard emailed the two people on the list--Nick Sabadosh and Jackie Dane.

Nick and Jackie contacted each other to share their ideas. They were both excited by what they had experienced at the CHI conference, and shared a desire to form a local chapter that would provide a year-round CHI conference experience. With that goal in mind, they recruited co-workers from NCR and Ratio, and coordinated a meeting to kickoff the new chapter. The first CHI*Atlanta meeting took place on June 17, 1997 in the "vault" at Ratio’s offices in Buckhead. Thirteen people attended that first meeting, most from NCR and Ratio.

A core group of leaders emerged from the initial meeting to form the Steering Committee, which lead the bootstrapping phase of the chapter. In October 1997, chapter officers were appointed, and the group became the CHI*Atlanta Executive Council Board.

The ACM and SIGCHI, and especially Richard, provided valuable assistance during this phase, including a mailing list of Atlanta-area ACM members that was used to create the first round of CHI*Atlanta meeting announcements. Ratio DesignLab and NCR HITC provided generous support to the founding of CHI*Atlanta, including meeting space and technical support for the initial CHI*A website. With help from these and other groups, and with the dedication of the volunteers and members, the CHI*A membership grew to more than 100 members in its first year.