The Council of the IPA is establishing committees that will take on some of the tasks of running the Association, and will allow us to expand what we can do for the field of phonetics. Here are the committees currently being set up, their Council memberships, and brief descriptions. At least some committees will be adding non-Council members, including student members.
Alphabet, Charts and Fonts (Pat Keating (chair), Asher Laufer, Wai-Sum Lee, Adrian Simpson, John Wells (consulting member)) - Contact point for proposals for changes to the alphabet or chart; production of IPA charts in various fonts, file formats, and image resolutions; online distribution of these charts; liaison with SIL and Unicode Technical Committee; liaison with International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association; soliciting, vetting, and disseminating IPA charts in languages other than English and tables of correspondences between IPA and non-IPA symbols.
Conference Sponsorships and Student Awards (Pam Beddor, John Esling, Jonathan Harrington, Katerina Nicolaidis (chair), Masaki Taniguchi) - Policies for conference/workshop sponsorship; evaluation of requests to the IPA for such sponsorship. Guidelines and criteria for evaluating applications for IPA Student Awards and Gösta Bruce travel awards; solicitation and evaluation of applications for these awards. Determination and management of annual budget for awards.
Education (Patricia Ashby, Plinio Barbosa, Cecile Fougeron, Keith Johnson, Maria-Josep Sole (chair)) - Educational content of the IPA’s website and other educational outreach to students and teachers of phonetics.
History (Michael Ashby (chair), Bill Barry, Janet Fletcher, Pat Keating) - History of the Association and its journals, and of phonetics more generally. Liaison with ISCA SIG on History of Speech Communication Research, The Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, and with the historical acoustic-phonetics collection (HAPS) at TU Dresden.
Phonetic Documentation of Languages (Kofi Adu Manyah, Ian Maddieson (chair), Alexis Michaud, Ailbhe Ni Chasaide, Daniel Recasens, Marija Tabain) - Encourage and fund phonetic fieldwork through existing organizations; offer expert advice to fieldworkers; liaison with archives of language materials.
Social Media and Outreach (Martine Grice, Jane Stuart-Smith (chair)) - Develop our social media, including our website, our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and our presence in Wikipedia, especially with a view to outreach to non-members who are interested in phonetics and the IPA.
