The main activity of Prague ACM SIGCHI is to organize free, publicly available meetings, which take place about every other month. The structure of these meetings is very similar to those of the USA-based SIGCHI chapters, BayCHI and BostonCHI, since the Prague ACM SIGCHI is built around concepts developed by these chapters.

The local chapter of SIGCHI was established in 1998. Until 2006, it was mainly focused on the organization of specialized professional events and lectures. After the success of Prague World Usability Day 2005, the first public event in this field held locally, Sun Microsystems, the Czech Technical University Department of Computer Science in Prague – Faculty of Electrical Engineering (CTU FEE) and Dobry web began to organize public SIGCHI meetings locally. The first meeting was held on March 23, 2006.

Since then, there have been many meetings with speakers from companies such as Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Microsoft, IBM and Google and individuals like Aaron Marcus.

The next milestone was establishing the non-profit organization, "Občanského sdružení Prague Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction," or Prague ACM SIGCHI, in Prague on January 8th, 2008.

Statuses (in Czech).

Membership benefits

All meetings organized by Prague ACM SIGCHI, including World Usability Day, are free and open to the public.

Members of Prague ACM SIGCHI receive the following benefits:

• Membership in a prestigious international association, ACM SIGCHI.
• Access to the library of Prague ACM SIGCHI (Contains many books which are not available in the Czech Republic written by Jakob Nielsen, Donald Norman, Alana Cooper and others).
• 40% discount on any training organized by Prague ACM SIGCHI (you save 1000 Kč per standard training event).
• 20% discount on any standard training of Dobry web (you save approximately 600 Kč per standard training event).
• Discount on entrance fees to conferences organized by Dobry web, (you save approximately 800–1400 Kč per conference).

Membership fees:

• Standard – 500 Kč/year.
• Renewals – 400 Kč/year.
• Students and others in academia – 300 Kč/year.

Contacts:

Leadership

• Chair: Jiri Mzourek

  Works at Sun Microsystems as the Senior Manager of User Experience. He is responsible for an international team focused on Sun developer products (NetBeans IDE, Sun Studio IDE, Zembly). He built the local Sun user experience team from scratch. They are the only full-featured Sun user experience team not based in the United States. He also initiated and managed the creation of the first local usability lab and coordinates the cooperation between Czech Technical University in Prague and Sun Microsystems to produce the local World Usability Day conference. Prior to his work at Sun he focused on the user experience of open source projects. Currently he is mainly focused on problems related to the management of user experience. Web: www.mzourek.org.

  jiri.mzourek@sigchi.cz

  

• Vice Chair: Zdenek Mikovec, Ph.D.

  Works at CTU FEE in the Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction as a researcher and teacher and is in charge of the university's usability lab. He has co-lead many international research projects funded by the European Union (Mummy, ELU, i2home, VitalMind, AEGIS). His main focus is on the interaction needs of disabled people, mainly with visual impairments, and interaction in special environments (interactive TV, mobile). Web: http://cs.felk.cvut.cz/webis/people/xmikovec.html.

  zdenek.mikovec@sigchi.cz

  

• Secretary: Professor Pavel Slavik

  A pioneer of HCI in the Czech Republic, he established the local ACM SIGCHI chapter. Currently he lectures in the Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction of CTU FEE. His work focuses mainly on special user interfaces, graphical interactions and data visualizations. He has been on the committees of many international conferences focused on computer graphics and HCI. Web: http://cs.felk.cvut.cz/webis/people/slavik.html.

  pavel.slavik@sigchi.cz

  

• Treasurer: Josef Holy

  Josef Holy work at Sun Microsystems as an Interaction and Social Network Designer for internal and external web applications. His primary focus these days is on new web trends and their implication on user-centered design.
  

  josef.holy@sigchi.cz

  

• Web Site Committee: Lubos Ploteny

  Lubos is an expert focused on the usability, marketing and development of web pages. He authored the book "Budování úspěšného firemního webu – strategie, tvorba, propagace". He has successfully established several online shops and is still responsible for the marketing and future development of some of them .
  

  lubos.ploteny@sigchi.cz

  

• Membership Committee: Ondrej Langr

  Ondrej Langr is an Interaction Designer at Sun Microsystems. He is focused on user interface design and evaluation. In the past, he worked on the EU research project i2home and for Siemens Business Services.

  ondrej.langr@sigchi.cz

  

• Public Relations Committee: Stepan Doubrava

  Stepan Doubrava is an Interaction Designer at Sun Microsystems dedicated to the Sun Studio IDE project. He focuses on user interface design and evaluation. In the past he worked at Ricardo Prague and was responsible for GUI design and implementation and at Inter Informatics where he worked on a data processing design for Airbus.
  

  stepan.doubrava@sigchi.cz

  

• Revisor: Jakub Franc

  Jakub Franc is a User Researcher at Sun Microsystems focused on usability testing, qualitative data gathering and the creation of user profiles (personas). He also participates in CTU research projects and extends the interaction between the fields of HCI and psychology. His Ph.D. project in cognitive psychology is focused on the spatial imagination of visually impaired people and their mental processes and strategies for navigation in physical spaces without sight.
  

  jakub.franc@sigchi.cz