Hi all,

As many of you will know, we received approval from the ADHO steering Committee last week to be recognised as a formal Special Interest Group (SIG).

This brings with it some organisational and reporting responsibilities. We must elect a chair and establish an executive that includes (in addition to other volunteers or elected members) ex officio representation from the various constituent organisations that make up ADHO.

In order to set up our initial administrative structure, we ask you to

a) Nominate or volunteer to be a candidate for chair.

b) Nominate somebody or volunteer to be a member of our first year's executive committee. This will be a group of 6-10 people that will help with general administrative tasks, which include coordinating different activities and regional efforts, administering and raising funds, managing our web presence and outreach. The chair and executive will also work this year on drafting bylaws for approval by the SIG and on helping establish regional and project-oriented workgroups. We'd especially like to ensure that we have a diversity of views, experiences, languages, etc. on this, so if you have any interest at all in the committee, please consider volunteering.

If you would like to nominate or volunteer for either chair or executive you can do so by writing to Alex Gil (colibri.alex@gmail.com) with the subject line GO::DH Exec Council. Alex will coordinate the election of the chair if required. If he receives a larger or smaller number of volunteers for the executive than is manageable, he will return to the list for advice.

We'd like to have the executive and chair in place by the end of next week, so nominations/self-nominations should be submitted to Alex no later than next Thursday (January 17, 2013).

In addition to the core council, we will be supporting working groups. I've been discussing with Neil Fraistat, the ADHO chair, Alex Gil, and Marcus Bingenheimer, who have been acting with me as (self-appointed) co-chairs of the initial proposal, and we think that it might also be useful to follow the following principles in structuring and staffing these working groups:

1) That our core activities are Discovery, Community-building, and Research. 2) That we seek always to ensure that perspectives from different regions, types of economies, languages, ranks, and types of employment are represented in our leadership, activities, and working groups 3) That we support the use of multiple languages in our activities and leadership as much as possible.

We are also working hard on our web presence (http://www.globaloutlookDH.org/) and we will have some news about that shortly, including a list of current activities that fall under our purview.

All the best,

=dan