The management board of the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (GAMEO)* held their annual meeting both in person in Goshen and Elkhart, Indiana, USA, and by Zoom on 24 May 2024. This meeting brought together board members from the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands to discuss the upcoming year of projects and to facilitate a transition in board leadership.
One key focus of this year’s meeting was expanding GAMEO’s multilingual offerings. GAMEO board members met with Michèle Sigg of the Dictionary of African Christian Biography (DACB) to learn about Sigg’s experience with publishing multilingual web content and increasing accessibility for DACB users.
Following the meeting, GAMEO members agreed on several updates to the site to increase multilingual access.
One of these updates is already complete – on May 28th, GAMEO released two new article categories, French language articles, and Spanish language articles, that allow users to locate and access articles based on the publishing language of the material.
Board members also voted to allow content submissions in any language and to work toward integrating Google Translate options into the site.
In addition to those changes, board members allocated a portion of this year’s budget for web updates. The planned updates include making the site more smartphone-friendly, redesigning GAMEO’s homepage, and adding tools to make it easier for users to suggest corrections and updates.
With the retirement of Jon Isaak, executive secretary of the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission and GAMEO board chair since 2020, and Bert Friesen, GAMEO financial liaison, Aileen Friesen of the D.F. Plett Historical Research Foundation will take on both roles.
—GAMEO news release
* GAMEO is an online free encyclopedia that is probably the most authoritative source of information about Anabaptist Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish that is available on the internet.