When I read this I looked at the list of countries available for registration and found that the country list Adobe uses includes both the United Kingdom and Ireland, and I couldn't think of any other English-speaking countries in Europe, so I wasn't sure what this fellow was talking about. It turns out that the man lives in Jersey on the Channel Islands (right off the coast of France) which are part of Great Britain, but not part of the United Kingdom. Before he could register his product correctly Adobe had to go in and fix their international registration program to allow for the Channel Islands.

This little glitch in Adobe's system led me to think about two things:

First, how many of us in LISA would have made the same mistake? While I am sure that many of the Europeans would have been aware of this, I think most Americans and Asians would have walked right into this same mistake, as did I.

Second, what we do matters to people. The man in Jersey in the Channel Islands could not register his software and could not upgrade his software as a result of an error. Overall a small problem perhaps, but not to him. What if it were not product registrations that were held up, but shipments of a vitally needed drug, or the completion of a multi-billion Euro business deal? What we do has an impact on the world, often in ways we can neither see nor predict.

I think many of us have at times been struck by the fact that no matter how much we know, we never know enough. There is always something beyond our reach or experience. We always need education, and the more education we have the more it seems we need. Many of us end up in the language industries because we are curious about the world and want to learn more about the cultures and peoples around the world, so we are focused on education, even if not always in an academic setting.

Since its inception over ten years ago LISA has been about education. Take away the fancy locations and marketing opportunities, and what does LISA provide its members? Knowledge and experience. People come to LISA events to learn about their industry, about their competitors, and about opportunities.

There is a tremendous amount of knowledge in our members and in what they have written. Because of this LISA is now working to convert the entire archive of LISA Newsletters to a consistent HTML format that will allow users to search the history of what members have written. (Until now the LISA Newsletter Archives have been available, but only in a variety of formats and styles that have made effective use of this resource difficult at best). Keep an eye out for the announcement of this new resource, and make use of it when it is available.

In addition LISA has been quietly working to update the LISA Education Initiative Taskforce (LEIT) page (http://www.lisa.org/leit) that lists courses and educational resources for the benefit of the industry. In conjunction with LEIT, LISA is also planning a number of projects and collaborations with notable figures in industry and academia which will provide considerable information to the industry. Watch for these in the coming year.

The articles

• In Single-sourcing Solutions: A Silver Bullet? Medtronic's Beth Anne Chrobot talks about her company's experience in implementing a single-source solution. Perhaps most importantly for those looking at implementing a single-source solution, she talks about how upper management was convinced to lend its support to the project. LISA members often lament that they have no sway with upper management, but here is a case where a member was able to make an effective pitch to upper management and get the resources needed to push ahead. This article is a chance for members to learn from the experience of a company entering the field of content management that is the theme of the upcoming LISA event in Washington D.C.
• One of the most enjoyable things about the language industries is the individuals you meet. In the LISA Profile of Leonid Glazytchev we continue the tradition of letting our members get to know some of the people in the industry a little better.
• In Intratextual Inconsistency: Risks of Implementing Orthographies for Less-Prevalent Languages Marilyn Mason and Jeff Allen discuss some of the linguistic issues that make dealing with Creoles in the Caribbean difficult. While the focus is on writing sytems for these languages, the issues outlined will be familiar to those working in other areas as well. Unfortunately these issues also point out why many people on the planet may never be the recipients of the same benefits that many of us take for granted -- the markets are simply too small and too fragmented to be economically viable for many outside companies to deal with.
• In The Ides March On, Alan Melby discusses the recent formation of various working groups within OSCAR and OSCAR's reaching out to other standards bodies to address various issues that affect most of us to some extent or another. What does OSCAR need from LISA members? More support.
• RAND and Open Standards is an update on the issue of the W3C's RAND proposal, which was covered on the LISA site late last year. Although the furor about topic has died down to an extent, this issue is far from settled and is very important to anyone in the IT industries.
• IDC's Market Survey of Multilingual Websites will be familiar to many of our readers since it has been available for some time on the LISA home page. Soon however, it will taken from the home page, so it needs a permanent home. You will be able to access it in this issue of the Newsletter from now on. In some ways this article best fits the education theme of this issue since it provides information and learning to our members about a topic important to many.

We hope you enjoy the selected of articles presented in this issue of the LISA Newsletter and that you find them informative and useful.

-Arle Lommel, LISA

P.S. Just as we go to press we have added some new information to the LISA Homepage about an outstanding panel on managing global enterprise content at the upcoming LISA Global Strategies Summit in Washington D.C. (March 13 - 15). If you haven't decided to come yet, see what you're missing.