I’ve been elected Secretary/Treasurer of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for a two-year term beginning 1 July 2026, alongside incoming President Elisa Bertino (Purdue University, USA) and Vice President Rashmi Mohan (Splunk Inc., USA).
For context: ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, a global membership organisation spanning research, industry, education and practice. It is responsible for much of the field’s leading publications in computing (via the ACM Digital Library), its flagship journals and conferences, professional and practitioner development, and global policy engagement. From ACM’s own FY25 figures: 103,009 members, more than half of them outside the US, organised across 1,068 chapters and 37 Special Interest Groups, running 250 ACM-sponsored conferences and workshops a year with over 75,000 attendees worldwide. Financially, it’s a sizeable global nonprofit with annual revenue and expenditure comfortably in nine figures; please see the FY25 annual report for the actual figures.
ACM’s governing Council has 16 members; five of them make up the Executive Committee, which includes the three directly elected officers (President, Vice President and Secretary/Treasurer), each serving a two-year term. The Secretary/Treasurer carries direct oversight of finances, audit and risk frameworks, and governance processes, working closely with Council, the Executive Committee, and ACM staff.
I’ve been an ACM member since July 2009, and an elected or appointed volunteer since 2017, when I joined ACM Europe Council. From there: Vice Chair of Europe Council (2019–2021), the ACM Europe Technology Policy Committee (2020–2024), Member-at-Large of ACM Council (2020–2024, co-opted 2024–2026), and the ACM Publications Board (2021–present); alongside, most recently, the Financial Model Task Force, one of ten Presidential Task Forces under outgoing two-term President Yannis Ioannidis’s “ACM 4.0” strategic plan. The full record is longer than is interesting to list here, but the point of naming it isn’t the list itself; it’s that close to a decade of doing ACM’s governance work, on top of being a member for seventeen years, has given me a fairly wide-angle view of the organisation: how differently its mission lands across regions, how the financial and editorial machinery actually works, and where the gap sits between what Council decides and what the wider membership experiences. Alongside previous non-executive and board-level roles, that’s the experience I’ll be drawing on over the next two years.
This post is deliberately short; the longer one, on what I actually think this role needs to focus on and why, will be coming over the next month or so. For now: thank you to everyone who voted, and to ACM colleagues past and present for the trust. The discipline and domain of computing is at an unusually consequential moment, and I’m glad to be part of the team helping to steer one of its most important institutions through it.
Digital Society & Policy 