The Vindaloo Agenda

[Heidi Johnson]

Jeff wrote:
> I'd be happy to hear any comments anyone has on this agenda.
Well, first I have to say how much I appreciate the name you've
given our tasklist. It's so much more fun than the "Outreach
Working Group", which makes us sound like a bunch of reformers :-).
With Vindaloo Agenda, we can imagine being featured in an A film
starring Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow.

> 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.
The first step should be to figure out what our options are. The publisher's
room, a room of our own where we do demos all day, a half-day workshop...?
Does anyone already know what the range of possible formats might be
at an LSA meeting? Or Gary & Steven, could you remember roughly what it
cost to do the OLAC room, and how well that went?  We should have some
clues about what we'd like to do before March, probably, to be sure
we really meet the LSA deadlines (which always seem shockingly early to me.)

>
> 3. It was generally agreed upon that one of the greatest barriers 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.
Did we agree on a general notion of what the range and depth of these
docs should be? For example, would we want a mini-PowerPoint doc on the
OLAC Role element (which I happen to have), or is that too narrow a topic?


> 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.
We could use a very superficial level doc explaining what it's all
about: briefly, shallowly, what OLAC is and what it's good for, aimed
at the 95% of our audience who won't care how any of it works.

I'll volunteer to write something, and I promise to actually produce
it in a reasonable time :-). (I'm designating August as writing
catch-up month, since everyone else associated with AILLA will be
gone all month.) Maybe I could help with the markup one? Assuming
that means something like an overview of OLAC metadata for field
linguists?

Heidi