Newsletter to the SPoCs

9 June 2008

Dear SpoCs,

A few updates from the past weeks:

1. Organisational Matters:
New Single Points of Contact: The IYA2009 keeps growing: we would like to welcome our new National SPoCs from to East Timor, Slovenia and Macau and also our new Organisational Node, the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC). We now have 118 National Nodes and 21 Organisational Nodes.

2. Resources
IYA2009 Trailer
We have now collected all the translations and corrections to the trailer scripts and are finalizing the production of 45 different languages versions of the IYA2009 trailer. They will be available for download on our website as soon as humanly possible on account of the huge amount of work this task involves. Thank you all for your collaboration and we are sure you will all put this resource to good use. Unfortunately, we will not be able to accept any more translations or correction from this date and hope you understand.

3. Communication with the IYA2009 Secretariat
As the IYA2009 network grows, it becomes more difficult for us to keep track of all the people involved in the several projects. Therefore, we ask you if you could please create a ‚Äúsignature‚Äù at the bottom of your email messages to the Secretariat where you state your name, country and contacts details. This would make our work a lot easier and faster and we thank you in advance for it. It can be something like:

Name
(Country) SPoC
Institution
Phone number
Email

4. A message from the Opening Ceremony Special Task Group
"One month ago an email was sent, concerning the Opening Ceremony at the Unesco HQ on 15-16 January 2009. We gave you the deadline of 31 May to tell us how many people from your National node are interested in attending and whether you had the intention to select 1 or 2 students to come to Paris. Please answer as soon as possible, since the process will take time, and we need to have a first approximation of the number of participants to foresee.

With kind regards,

The IYA2009 Opening Event Organisers ( astro.2009@obspm.fr )"

5. Upcoming IYA2009 meetings:

Upcoming IYA2009 meetings:
- APRIM2008 (Kunming, China), 3 - 6 August 2008 - http://aprim.ynao.ac.cn/
- JENAM2008 (Wien, Austria) - 8-12 September 2008 - http://www.univie.ac.at/jenam2008/ or http://www.roe.ac.uk/ukatc/test/symposium.html

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,

Pedro, Lars and Mariana
IYA2009 Secretariat