The Vindaloo Agenda

[Jeff Good]

Hello everyone,

First, I have an apology and correction that may affect an Outreach
session in 2005. I had thought it would be held in Houston. But, I was
wrong--Houston is scheduled to hold the LSA meeting in _2006_. In 2005,
it will be in San Francisco. This shouldn't be a problem for me. (I'm
not in Berkeley anymore, but I don't mind traveling.) But it may affect
some people's ability to participate. Fortunately, we are planning far
enough ahead that I think we can deal with any problems that might
result from this.




On Wednesday, August 27, 2003, at 04:21 PM, Heidi Johnson wrote:

> A while back Jeff Good wrote:
>> 2. A pre-conference meeting before the official LSA conference begins.
>> This could probably be done under the partial auspices of the LSA,
>> but,
>> presumably, we'd have to pay for the room ahead of time. The 1999(?)
>> proto-OLAC meeting did something like this, and, apparently,
>> attendance
>> was good.
> This would only attract people who are already interested, though,
> wouldn't it? I don't imagine herds of people will be wanting to spend
> extra days in Dallas just for the scenery.

My sense from something Steven had said about a similarly scheduled
meeting he once had was that it would attract people arriving early
without anything else to do. We'd get new people that way, but only
those whose travel plans allowed for it. I don't advocate this idea
myself--but wanted to put it out there as a possibility.

>> 3. A LinguistList style room and "office hours". I don't know if this
>> costs anything or if the LSA just gives Linguist a spare room. The
>> disadvantage to this is that we'd be sequestered and people would have
>> to come find us (we could, perhaps, alleviate this somewhat by teaming
>> up with Linguist and sharing a room).
>>
> If we could be in a room that's right in the midst of some session
> rooms,
> especially the SSILA sessions, we could potentially attract people who
> are skipping a few talks.

That's a good point--and a good audience to look for. Everybody has
some weird fifteen-minute gap to fill when they skip talks, and we
could try to take advantage of that.


> I like this idea the best. I'm starting to think about something kind
> of
> like a science fair, with computers and stuff where people could have
> some hands-on interaction with software, OLAC searches, the EMELD site,
> other archives, etc. I'll be driving, as will numerous people from UT,
> so we could bring all sorts of equipment from AILLA's lab. We might be
> able to generate traffic by good old-fashioned sales techniques, like a
> colorful banner and free coffee & cookies. People will do a lot for a
> cookie at 3:00 in the afternoon.

See my above (unfortunate) note about location. We could push this all
up to 2006. Although, probably, we might want to do this more than one
year anyway. We could do something less flashy, at least, in 2005. I
like your idea of a science fair a lot--my main question would be: who
would staff it and when? We'd probably have to involve a lot more
people than the core working group. This isn't an insurmountable
problem--just something to think about. (A Linguist connection would
help considerably with this, of course.)

> Is anyone from this group going to Boston? I'm still agonizing about
> whether
> or not I should go. Giving a talk at SSILA last year was completely
> ineffective, but I hate to let a year go by with no archiving presence
> whatsoever. If anyone has any bright ideas for some kind of ad hoc
> something, I might could be persuaded.

Barring very unforeseen circumstance, I'll be in Boston. Given what
Michael said in his reply:

 From Michael Appleby:
> LINGUIST List will be at LSA this year, and we're planning to highlight
> E-MELD and the school of Best Practice, so OLAC will get publicity in
> this
> way.  We only recently sent an email to LSA to say we would like office
> hours again, so there is still time to arrange something.

We could try to do something ad hoc with them. For a start, we could
try to see if we can round up enough OLAC people to be around during
the office hours. And, if so, take things from there.

Jeff