Dear SIGUL colleagues,

SIGUL intends to bring together a number of professionals involved in the development of language resources and technologies for under-resourced languages.

To comply with the ELRA & ISCA by-laws on SIGs, a Board has to be elected by all involved parties. Its role and duties were explained within the call for nominations.

According to these bylaws, the elected members of the Board shall consist of a chairperson, a co-chair and a secretary.

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.

Following the Call for candidates (from 22 November 2017 to 7th December 2017), we received four nominations (all valid according to by-laws, see the attached file for biographies and statements).

We are now organizing an electronic vote to select three candidates out the four nominees. All experts who are/were involved in pre-SIGUL events (SLTU, CCURL, others) were compiled into a mailing list, asked to nominate the candidates for the SIGUL Board, and now asked to vote for three nominees.

We  are using the Adoodle.org voting service for this. It is a service that guarantees:

-    the list of participants is given explicitly in the sent emails, corresponding to the transparency and fairness principles of ADoodle.org
-    what is anonymous is the action of casting a vote: no one can know who has cast a vote.
-     once the vote is created, all its parameters are voluntarily kept fixed by the vote machine, strictly and simply applying what has been announced formally in the sent email. Therefore the vote will go to its conclusion, without allowed future modification.


Each of you is allowed to vote for at most 3 candidates, since there are 3 positions within the board. Your email is your identifier.

The vote starts immediately and the deadline for voting is Monday, January the 8th 23:59 CET (Central European Time, 22:59 GMT). You will be receiving an email from " no_reply@adoodle.org" with a subject like:  Subject: [ADoodle.org] ELRA-ISCA Special Interest Group on Under Resourced Languages (SIGUL). Please make sure this email does not end in your spam box.

I am attaching below a short biography and a statement/manifesto that explains why the candidates want to be a member of the SIGUL board. They are in the order I received them.

A specific email will be sent from the voting site with explanations on how to vote.

Best Regards

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