[Sigwac] Call for discussion: The SIGWAC crisis (instead, of an announcement of WAC-XI)

[Roland Schäfer]

Hello Miloš and everyone,

thanks for keeping the discussion alive.

As far as I can see, five people have contributed to the discussion so
far. What about the other 179 registered list members (which, by the
traditional definition, are the members of SIGWAC)?

On 01.08.17 10:09, Miloš Jakubíček wrote:
> 
>> Still this leaves the question of co-location of the next WAC events open.
>> I
>> don't have an answer here. Yes, I don't think many people like overpriced
>> ACL/LREC events. However, many (in the CL community) commit themselves to
>> going
>> there. As mentioned, the previous events co-located with those conferences
>> never
>> failed because of the lack of submissions.
>>
> 
> We had a brief chat in Birmingham last week. I proposed checking whether
> (and under what conditions) WAC could collocate with the annual CLARIN
> conferences.
> Darja Fišer (now CLARIN's user involvement officer) will discuss this topic
> at CLARIN's board meeting in September -- so we might want to revisit then.

while I have nothing but the highest respect for the CLARIN initiative,
this would be the least attractive option IMO, especially as a regular
solution. CLARIN meetings are neither attended by most (corpus)
linguists nor by most computational linguists. This would mean a
complete withdrawal to the realm of resource creators/curators. The
unique feature of WAC used to be (and should be) its flexibility and its
mixed audience, and while CLARIN has many positive features, these two
are likely not among them.

I just looked at the programme of the 2016 CLARIN conference here

https://www.clarin.eu/content/programme-clarin-annual-conference-2016

to confirm this assessment.

Ceterum censeo WAC primarily needs new "members" (= new people aware of
and interested in the potential of WAC) not just a hosting event, and we
should agree on a TOPIC that has the potential to attract them (such as
CleanerEval focusing on conceptual problems rather than technical ones,
at least in the first phase). Since the discussion so far has basically
confirmed that it is very hard to find a conference to co-locate with,
it might be a good idea to organise a stand-alone symposium without
having to decide on a hosting event. I'm not sure about CL, but in
linguistics, stand-alone workshops and symposiums are a common thing.

Best,
Roland