speakers on Burmese issues

[cameronb@xxxxxxxxxxx]

After having problems of my own in finding a speaker who can come to my
campus and talk about Burma issues, I've decided there's a need for some
kind of a speakers' clearinghouse to provide names of speakers on *any* of
the many aspects of the situation in Burma.  I have David Arnott's postings
of organizations, but that doesn't list the particulars of potential
speakers.  The clearinghouse I'm thinking of would be a database with
something like the following fields:
Name
Address
Phone
Fax
E-mail
Affiliation
Availability (school vacations, weekends, any time, etc)
Presentation topic (organization, investment, Burmese history, trafficking
of women, slavery, drugs, etc)
Length
Medium (talk only, slides, video, film, etc)
Willingness to travel
Support required (travel, accommodation, meals, honorarium, etc)
Other (what have I left out?

I would NOT recommend speakers or presenters.  I think it would be
necessary for me to require that anybody I listed be an accredited
(whatever that means--guess I'd have to decide) member of one of the
organizations on the Arnott list, in order to keep the riffraff out, but I
would not be able to attest to the showmanship or factual accuracy of any
of the speakers on the list. A clearinghouse is a clearinghouse, not an
agency.  (But I would also be willing to collect and archive and make
available any feedback received.)

Given the list, people wanting presenters would write me, preferably by
e-mail, stating topic of interest, preferred dates and so forth, and I
would send what I found in my database.  Using that information, these
people would then make their own arrangements with the speaker.  (I can't
imagine that it would be this simple in practice, but so far, so good.)

If this looks like the sort of thing people are willing to support, I stand
ready to begin collecting names and contact information.  If anybody has
suggestions on how to organize this thing, I'd be pleased to hear them,
too.