[All] Open Letter to the EC - please circulate and sign *before Wednesday March 25*

[Steven Krauwer]

Dear members of the CLARIN community,

I would very much like to ask you to join us in signing the Open
Letter to the EC.

Let me give you some background information and explain why this
is relevant for us.

The people in the EC's Data Value Chain unit in Luxemburg have
expressed their concern about the lack of interest and support
for human language technologies, both higher up in the EC and at
the national level in the member states, and they fear that it
will completely disappear from the (funding) agenda if we don't
manage to show the relevance of our technologies for the
development of the Digital Single Market (DSM).

The DSM is of course not the focus of CLARIN, but there are at
least two reasons why we should take this seriously. First of all
a reduction of the funding for HLT would directly affect most of
the present CLARIN community (i.e. those who provide data and
services), and secondly we should not underestimate the economic
potential of digital cultural heritage services in the DSM -
which would help us to demonstrate our societal and economic
impact.

PLease take a minute to sign the letter and to circulate it
further. Time is short, because already on March 25 the issue
will be on the agenda of a strategic meeting about DSM
priorities.

Best regards,

Steven


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	Please Sign and Circulate: Open Letter to the EC
Date: 	Sun, 22 Mar 2015 13:28:24 +0100
From: 	Georg Rehm <georg.rehm at dfki.de>
To: 	META-NET Office <office at meta-net.eu>



Dear colleagues,

we would like to ask you for your support of an Open Letter to
the EC, requesting to address the multilingual challenge in their
forthcoming Strategy on the Digital Single Market (DSM)
<http://multilingualeurope.eu/>. Our open letter is a response
from the Language (Technology) community - including Linguistics,
Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Data,
Knowledge, Cognitive Science, Multilingualism etc. - to the EC
consultations for their DSM Strategy.

Unfortunately, there is a very severe danger that our field is
completely vanishing from the EC priorities. Currently it's not
yet part of the strategic priorities of EC Vice President Andrus
Ansip - we're trying to change that.

Language Technology has already been removed from the Horizon
2020 Work Programme for 2016/2017. We must act immediately!
Otherwise our field won't be recognised by the EC for the
foreseeable future.

This is why we would like to ask you to support our Open Letter
which is online for signing at:

* http://multilingualeurope.eu *

If you agree with our appeal, please sign the letter and
circulate this message to your colleagues, friends and networks.

We have to collect as many signatures as possible by the
beginning of next week. We will then inform all Commissioners
about this letter. On Wednesday (March 25), VP Andrus Ansip will
discuss the DSM priorities with his DSM Project Team.

The next few days are our only chance to get the EC's attention.
Let's use it!

Your support is very much needed! Please circulate this message
widely.

Hope to see many of you at our Riga Summit 2015 on the
Multilingual Digital Single Market: META-FORUM 2015 (April 27),
the Plenary Day (April 28), the Multilingual Web Workshop 2015
(April 29) - and more! Please register your attendance at
http://www.rigasummit2015.eu (participation is free of charge).

Thank you very much for your support!

Best wishes,
Georg Rehm

*Dr. Georg Rehm*
META-NET, Network Manager