I have a personal and professional interest in the emerging Central/Eastern European markets, and would like to explore ways of promoting LISA in those countries.

JOSÉ DE HOYOS (Director, International Product Development, Novell, Inc.)

As a member of the LISA Executive Committee, my efforts will be to ensure that LISA is an effective channel for software publishers and vendors to work together openly and bring some stability into what is too often a complex and confusing industry. Having spent the last seventeen years in the trenches of the three major areas of our business--localization tools development and implementation, localization vendor services, and software publishing. My contribution to LISA is a strong sense of reality based on my experience in these three fields. To an extent, our industry still operates in too much in a reactive and sometimes even panic mode. I believe LISA can be an important avenue for resolving many of the issues and helping the industry mature in professionalism. Some of my objectives would be:

• Keep the Forums open and honest, whereby members can deal with real issues and not merely be concerned with buying or selling services, or portraying a corporate image.
• Increase the level of participation, responsiveness, and commitment from the members, and consequently, as an organization respond to the needs and concerns raised by the members.
• Increase LISA's presence in the United States, Latin America and Asia, as well as strengthen its position in Europe to be able to address the localization issues that continue to arise from those markets.
• Identify where standards are needed and provide the means for them to be established.

All of us will benefit from growing and developing the localization industry. My commitment is to continually look for ways to open communication and understanding between all parties in the industry in order to resolve problems and improve partnerships.

ALAIN LINDEN (Director of Translation Services, AT&T Global Information Services)

If elected, I will concentrate my activities in the following manner:

• Developing cooperation among hardware and software manufacturers
• Establishing and promoting terminology standards among IT manufacturers
• Developing more intuitive and user-friendly products
• Gaining recognition with European governmental agencies

JAAP VAN DER MEER (Business Planning Manager, R.R. Donnelley Global Software Services)

In my view the localization business is facing some fundamental changes. As I am writing in this LISA newsletter, both publishers and service providers will be forced to innovate their price and product model as a result of new market changes. It is the role of LISA as an industry organization to identify the value of the localization services and to continuously search for the new added value in the perception of the supply and demand side of the market.

As a member of the Executive Committee of LISA it is my intention to help the localization industry by:

• identifying changing conditions and new requirements and anticipating future directions for all players
• motivating more valuable contributions from members and non- members to our LISA meetings
• contributing to valuable and relevant conference programmes and emphasizing the neutral conference setting
• strengthening relationships with other industry sectors to learn more about the world around us (after all, "localization" represents less than 10% of the total translation market).

Having been the first person to come up with the idea of creating this industry organization and calling the founding members together for the first meeting in November 1990, I believe I am well capable of helping LISA redefine its value and directions for the next critical stage in the history of our industry.

JUHANI PÄÄKKÖNEN (Managing Director, Trantex OY)

10 years as a Managing Director of a localization company has shown me that the industry has various interests which are sometimes difficult to align. Both publishers and vendors will, however, benefit if LISA can create standards and benchmarks for localization tasks.

Scientific training (M.Sc. in physics and computer sciences) has shown me the importance of logical reasoning and good specifications. This is why we need to:

1. Find out the common interests of the industry, such as standard terminology, evaluating tools, etc.
2. Standardize the definitions of various localization tasks in order to improve the efficiency and quality of the localization.
3. Standardize the metrics of quality to measure performance.
4. Understand the out sourcing process and its prerequisites.

LISA has launched these standardization tasks by setting up various Special Interest Groups. As the first enthusiasm is now over, these SIGs need to do the hard work. I believe that by monitoring these SIGs and having them regularly report in the LISA Newsletter that we can ensure proper completion of their work.

Equally important to LISA is broadening our membership base by shifting our focus only from the software industry to other industries that need localization. The public sector, electrical industry and automotive industry are just a few examples.

I consider these and several other subjects important for LISA and would promote them in the LISA Executive Committee.