Gregor Erbach <erbach@dfki.uni-sb.de>:
>
> Misha Wolf wrote:
> > I am writing this mail to ask whether any of you are in a position to encourage
> > your employer to sponsor one (or more) such hardship cases. This sponsorship
> > would, of course, be acknowledged on the Conference Web site. The amounts
> > needed are not very large. In the Georgian case we're talking of the
> > Conference registration fee of $775 [...]
>
> Irakli Garibashvili wrote:
> > >Unfortunately conference fee is impossibly high for our newly independent
> > >country.
> > >Could you clear for us if Organization Committee of the 10-th UNICODE
> > >conference could allow one participant from Georgia for free or at least for
> > >less acceptance fee?
>
> Misha,
> couldn't you encourage the organisers of the Unicode conference to offer
> a greatly reduced rate for participants from economically disadvantaged
> countries? I'm sure that Mr. Garibashvili is not the only one who is in
> this situation. I believe the financial loss to the conference organisers
> would be minimal since many potential participants from such countries
> just could not pay the higher rates (which amounts of several months'
> up to several years' salary).
>
> regards,
> Gregor
There is no substitute for physical attendance by certain national
representatives, so this is only a partial solution, but I think it
would be a great goal to work toward putting as much of the conference
on the web as possible. The sponsors of the conference might consider
devoting a portion of their resources to using the medium being
discussed--computers--as a medium.
It could begin with the conference proceedings in HTML format, then
slides and summaries of the talks could be provided, and at some point
the presentations themselves (preferably in Shockwave format to create a
navigable sync'ed combination of slides and audio) could be made
available as archives.
Carrying the conference live via RealAudio could also allow questions to
be accepted via email during the Q&A sessions, an increasingly popular
format that even some radio talk shows have begun to adopt. These
questions, sometimes submitted in advance, would be perused by a
moderator who would then pose the good ones (or questions representing
common themes) to the speaker.
Again, this is only a partial solution, especially because those
countries having the hardest time sending representatives also tend to
be those having the hardest time accessing the Internet. Even so, unlike
conferences on literature, drug policy, or medicine, those interested in
the details presented at Unicode conferences are nearly all
sophisticated computer users. It seems to me that the Internet is a
superb medium if your goal is to convey information to the most
sophisticated computer users in as many of the world's countries as
possible.
__Glen Perkins__
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:33 EDT