Dear All,

The joint ISCA-ELRA Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) has been created earlier in 2017.
SIGUL intends to bring together a number of professionals involved in the development of language resources and technologies for under-resourced languages (see more on  http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/sigs?layout=edit&id=198).

You are receiving this e-mail because you have been involved in pre-SIGUL events (SLTU, CCURL, others) and your email address has been put on the sigul@list.elra.info mailing-list, which contains approximately 300 members. This newly created mailing-list will work as a newsletter service, which means only moderators can post to it. Subscriptions are subject to prior approval, and the subscribers list is private (the archives will be public).

A provisional board was created to cope with the coming events organized by the SIG (current board persons are: Claudia Soria, Laurent Besacier and Sakriani Sakti). However, to respect ISCA by-laws on SIGs, it is now time to organize elections for the board. According to the ISCA website, the elected members of the SIG shall consist of a chairperson, a co-chair and a secretary (see board duties in the Appendix below). All elected officers shall be members in good standing with the SIGUL organization and  parent organizations (ELRA and ISCA). The term of all elected board members of the SIG shall be 2 years. They may be re-elected but consecutive appointments are limited to four consecutive terms.

The SIGUL election will follow the schedule below.

- Call for candidates (from now to December 7th) : if you want to be a candidate, please send a message to choukri@elda.org before Dec 7th with a short bio and a statement/manifesto that explains why you want to be an elected member of SIGUL board

- Electronic Voting (between December 7th  and December 21st) : a specific email will be sent with explanations on how to vote and information on the candidates (you will be allowed to vote for 3 candidates maximum, since there are  3 slots in the board).

 -After December 21st : announcement of results

We hope you will take an active part to this election and we are looking forward to see you during coming SIGUL events (CCURL during LREC 2018 and SLTU as a satellite workshop of Interspeech 2018). see http://www.ilc.cnr.it/en/content/ccurl-2018 and http://www.mica.edu.vn/sltu2018/ 

Best Regards

Khalid Choukri, in charge of supervising these elections for the  SIGUL commitee

Appendix 1: board members’ duties

The duties of the chair and co-chair persons shall be:

- To have executive authority over actions and activities of the SIG.
- To mutually support the chairperson duties, including acting as a surrogate at meetings when one cannot attend
- To prepare a joint annual written report on the activities of the SIG for presentation to the parent organisations.
- To act as Liaison Representative to one of the parent organization (ELRA or ISCA)
- To supervise the organization of SIGUL events  (CCURL, SLTU, others).

The duties of the secretary shall be:

- To maintain a membership list for the SIG.To maintain documents stating the aims of the group and the names and affiliations of the current board members, suitable for sending to prospective members and other inquirers.

- To maintain other records related to SIG activities, including but not limited to annual reports, records of sponsored and endorsed events, and recordings of presentations at the different SIG events.

- To assist the chair and co-chair in organizing SIGUL events  (CCURL, SLTU, others).

-To represent the SIG when chair and co-chair cannot attend meetings