GLOW has gone through some difficult times. Our goal is and always has been to represent the community in the best way. For that reason, we are committed to listening to criticism and find the fairest way to address it. As a reaction to urges by the LODGI group, we attended to their concerns by asking the community about whether a new vote on the venue for GLOW47 should be conducted or not. We realize that this step was considered inappropriate by some people, but this was the only way for us to see whether the broad community sees a need to readdress the issue.
In the course of this process, we took the long overdue opportunity to revisit the inadequacy of the archaic GLOW voting system of GLOW, and move to a fully democratic system. After another administrative vote, the actual vote on the venue yielded a small majority against holding GLOW in Israel. The entire process was difficult and more than unfortunate for the organizers in Israel, for which we apologized to them, but we hope that our transparent way to deal with what felt like an impossible situation at least shows that we only had the best intentions.
In reaction to this outcome, again various criticism was received, which we are taking very seriously. For one, we are generally moving to a democratic online voting system to allow the entire GLOW membership to participate (not just whoever happens to be present at the business meeting) and enable each member to voice their opinion freely and secretly. We are also considering a better way of choosing and approving conference venues in the future so that such an unfortunate situation won’t arise again. Lastly, and most importantly, we are planning a broader discussion with the entire generative community about some fundamental issues regarding the GLOW organization: the purpose of GLOW, the way GLOW can serve the generative community, the name of the society, the geographical range, and others. Our goal is to strengthen generative linguistics and support its members in the best way possible, and we will be reaching out to the community with various options soon and throughout the year.
We hope that you support us in doing so.