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GATE Needs Your (5 Mins) Help

Dear friends

This page is about the future funding of GATE, and is a request for help from you, the GATE Community:

Please send letters by August 31st if possible.

GATE is approaching its 20th birthday. That's 20 years of a free to download, free to use, open-source language engineering framework. It also represents 20 years of development and support from the GATE Team at the University of Sheffield. As you probably know, our work has been funded through European and UK research grants, together with some commercial support. Every new feature we add and every new release we make is funded directly by these grants. In recent years, these new releases have included the GATE Cloud platform and the Mimir indexing engine.

Continued development and support of GATE is only possible because of the funding that we receive. We now need to prepare for a new round of funding proposals, so that we can continue to develop GATE, continue to answer questions on the free GATE Users mailing list, continue to provide free documentation and training material, and continue to run the GATE Training Schools. We want to keep improving GATE: building on the work we have begun in Cloud support and Big Data support, and in areas such as the life sciences and social media processing.

So how can you help with this? All we need from you is a simple letter of support, that we can show to our funders. A strong show of support will help to convince our funders of the utility of GATE, and will help to ensure that this important open source project can benefit from future funding.

We would very much like you to describe in your letter the project, research, product, or commercial activity that you use GATE for, and how you use GATE in that work. Please tell us how GATE has benefited your work, and if the fact that it is open source makes a difference. It would also be useful for you to say if you have used the mailing list, used the training material, sent people to a GATE training school or had direct contact and support from the GATE Team.

We have put a letter template at: Template Letter with some suggestions of the sorts of things you might comment on, but please don't feel that you have to stick to this. Please email a signed PDF back to Kalina Bontcheva.

If you don't use GATE directly, but collaborate with us, you can use this alternative letter template and email it back to Kalina Bontcheva.

For the GATE Team, the most valuable part of GATE is its community of users - yourselves. Your contributions of code and training material, your feedback, questions, and above all enthusiasm, help drive GATE forward. That is why we are asking you, GATE's Community, to help us make sure that GATE lives on for another 20 years. We also want to thank you for supporting GATE all this time!

Replies and letters of support should be sent (preferably by email) to:

Dr Kalina Bontcheva
University of Sheffield
Department of Computer Science
Regent Court
211 Portobello
Sheffield S1 4DP
United Kingdom

Many thanks for your continued support

the GATE Team

Acknowledgement: This request for support is similar to one posted by Mark Musen on the Protege mailing list, 30/11/2010, and we would like to acknowledge the inspiration provided by that email.