Around 1965 or 1966, Sammet noticed a need for the exchange of intellectual information with others working with languages and software while she worked on
FORMAC. She was a member of ACM for a number of years but was not active until she became interested in starting a special interest group that would allow her to speak with other professionals in the field. After a couple of failed attempts at contacting the person in charge of Special Interest Groups and Special Interest Committees at ACM, Sammet contacted George Forsythe, president of ACM from 1964 to 1966, who named her Chairperson of the Special Interest Committee on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation. In order to gain interest in SICSAM, Sammet wrote letters to people she identified through publications and what was happening in the field at that time. She identified people at Bell Labs, Carnegie Mellon, and IBM who were in different divisions and groups. Sammet faced resistance from the interest group on numerical analysis in ACM. Roughly five years after SICSAM formed, there was a conference about mathematical software called SIGNUM. Sammet states that she fought her way to give a paper at SIGNUM because the group was not interested in non-numerical analysis of that kind of an activity. With assistance from those interested in SICSAM, Sammet organized a conference held in March 1966, which was the Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation (SYMSAM). In 1971 she was elected chair of SIGPLAN. She served one year of a two-year term before resigning because she was elected vice president of ACM in 1972. As chairperson of SIGPLAN, she organized conferences between SIGPLAN and various Special Interest Groups. Sammet has stated that these conferences were organized based on the recognition of how fundamental programming languages were to different aspects within computing. Sammet served as vice president of ACM from June 1972 to June 1974. Working with the president of ACM at the time, Tony Ralston, Sammet made the finances of ACM a priority. At the time of her vice presidency, ACM was almost bankrupt. Sammet convinced Ralston to hold a member-office forum prior to their annual conference. Sammet encouraged this based on her recognition that ACM had no realistic way of communicating with the membership. ==Death==