Hello SIGCIS members, Today we launch the SIGCIS Mahoney Fund. Please read on for a chance to help our graduate student members, honor a great historian and have your tax free donations matched 100%. At the 2007 lunch meeting SIGCIS held its first auction of donated books as a fundraising tool to support our initiatives and bring some fun to the event. Mike Mahoney served as the auctioneer, doing great job in driving up prices and generating a relaxed and festive atmosphere. As you all know, Mike died unexpectedly over the summer. (See https://blogs.princeton.edu/mahoney/ for the official tribute page). So this year when we met in Lisbon last month David Anderson took up Mike's (virtual) gavel and did an equally fine job auctioning the impressive volume of books donated by our members. This included an entire suitcase of in-demand books personally transported to Lisbon by Marguerite Avery, the MIT press editor responsible for its history of computing series. Between the auction and an appeal for donations in Mike's memory we raised more than $700 at the Lisbon meeting, even as the global financial system collapsed around us. We made the first presentation of our new graduate student travel award to Honghong Tinn of Cornell University, as the Michael S. Mahoney/MIT Press Graduate Student Travel Award. After the meeting I was relaxing and enjoying the prospect of making two partial awards for student travel costs for the 2009 Pittsburgh meeting when Ann Johnson, one of Mike's former Ph.D. students, did something that challenged me to shift my ambitions for the program into a higher gear. Ann made an annual giving pledge of up to $500 to match 100% of online and postal contributions received by SIGCIS. The money will be used to establish a capital pool for SIGCIS known as the Mahoney Fund. This is intended primarily to provide ongoing support for the new Michael S. Mahoney/MIT Press Graduate Student Travel Awards. Money held in the fund will grow proportionally with SHOT's own endowment. Mike's name sits very well on this award. He gave his time generously to SIGCIS, chairing our session on "50 Years of Computer Use" at last year's meeting and presenting his paper on "The Many Histories of Computing" in another session on "50 Years of Computing Historiography." When the graduate-student dominated SIGCIS panel proposal that included Mike as a commentator was rejected for the 2008 meeting he sent to the participants a message that "It was an interesting set of papers, and I would have enjoyed the opportunity to comment on them, and indeed to meet the authors. There'll be another opportunity, I'm sure." Sadly this was not to be, but just before his death he did perform one final act of service to the SIG as a member of the ad-hoc committee set up to establish policies and procedures for our forthcoming book prize (more on this soon). Mike was an important influence on the development of our field and on my own growth as a scholar. While a graduate student at Penn I was lucky enough to be able to enroll as a visiting student at Princeton solely for the purpose of making the journey up to Princeton once a week to take the "Computers and Organisms" course taught by Mike and his newly arrived colleague Angela Creager. (Princeton's alumni mail has followed me over five moves since then). In the years that followed I served with Mike on the IEEE Annals board and the ACM History committee. About three times a year we would see each other at one event or another and I always learned something from Mike's presentations or contributions to the discussion. While his training and instincts differed from my own in almost every respect he was always curious about the latest work in the history of computing. He sometimes shocked me by praising work or calling attention to topics far outside the boundaries of his personal interest in the intellectual history of computer science. This is because Mike was one of very few senior historians with prestigious academic appointments deeply committed to the evolution of the history of computing as a field with its own scholarly agenda and identity. He grappled with the scholarly shape and challenges of the field, ultimately producing what I think will be an influential call for its reconstitution not as "THE History of Computing" but as "The Histories of Computing(s)." http://www.princeton.edu/~mike/articles/histories/kingscch.htm We hope to celebrate Mike's intellectual legacy with a special day of supplementary programming at the next SHOT meeting. In the meantime this is your opportunity to recognize and honor his exemplary contribution to the SIG and his inspiring commitment to the discovery of new scholarship in our field by matching part of Ann's challenge. Donations can be made online at https://associations.press.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/shot/shot_donation.cgi. Online donations will receive an online confirmation for your tax records - as a non profit organization donations to SHOT are tax deductible for US tax payers (subject to the usual disclaimers). On the online form please select "Other" in the section "Designate a Priority" and enter "SIGCIS Mahoney Fund" in the adjacent box marked "Please Specify". SHOT's treasurer has confirmed that all donations marked in this way will be placed in our account. If you are able to follow Ann in making this an annual pledge rather than a one-off donation then please check the "Make this an annual contribution for X years" box. I am starting the ball rolling with a $100 annual pledge for each of the next five years. So that leaves at least $400 we need to find from other SIGCIS members to ensure that we rise collectively to Ann's challenge. In this time of academic cutbacks and rising travel costs, making it possible for graduate students to present at our annual meeting is a highly effective investment in the future of the field. In the meantime all of us could profit from another look at the articles and syllabi on Mike's own web page: http://www.princeton.edu/~mike/ and particularly http://www.princeton.edu/~mike/computing.html. Best wishes, Tom Haigh www.tomandmaria.com/tom