The Vindaloo Agenda

[Jeff Good]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to send out a message outlining the agenda the OLAC Outreach
Working Group agreed upon when we met at the EMELD workshop a week or so
ago. As a mnemonic that we met in an Indian restaurant, and in response to
Heidi's fondness for a certain Indian culinary word, I've named it the
"Vindaloo Agenda".

The working group agreed on three main items:

1. We will continue to work on an article for IJAL about linguistic data,
archives, and digital data with Laura, Gary, and Heidi writing about their
respective experiences in the area and with me writing the introductory
and concluding material. The aimed for date for everyone to have a draft
ready is October. We can use this list to discuss specific questions we
have as we begin writing.

2. The group will put one some sort of prominent demonstration at the
January 2005 LSA meeting in Houston--so, keep early January 2005 open. By
"prominent", the idea is to be set up in some high-traffic area, like the
publisher's room, for example. The first deadline to keep in mind, in this
regard, is April 2004, the deadline for LSA symposia (usually) for the
next year. While we don't aim t put on a symposium, we may want to keep
this option open. Based on this, we can revisit this issue seriously in
early March 2004.

3. It was generally agreed upon that one of the greatest barries to
outreach for OLAC is the lack of non-technical documents of all kinds.
Based on this concern, there was a call for the group to encourage to
creation of more non-technical documents. Two sorts of documents were
discussed:

a. Powerpoint presentations. Since many of us are often giving
presentations on OLAC-related issues, we decided it would be good if we
shared Powerpoint presentations with each other. The ultimate goal in this
would be to have a "library" of presentations that could be used by anyone
having to discuss a particular topic. If anyone has suitable
presentations, could they please pass them along to me?  I'll talk to
Steven and Gary about setting up a website where they can be downloaded.

b. Web documents. A need for more web documents was also discussed. The
possible topics for these are practically endless.


With respect to the need for more documents, I'll volunteer to write one
on some topic. I think it would be good to have an introduction to markup
and the logical format versus presentation format issue. Obviously, lots
of such documents exist in the world--but this would be focused on the
linguistic side of things and be very basic. But, if the group has other
suggestions, I could try my hand at another topic.

I'd also like to ask other members of the group to decide if they can
write a non-technical note on some topic. Maybe one of the archivists
could write an advice document on how to work with OLAC metadata and the
metadata standard documents?

I'll end this message now to keep it reasonably short. I'd be happy to
hear any comments anyone has on this agenda.

Jeff