An initial meeting between Aejaz Zahid (Head of Research & Development at Mada – Qatar Assistive Technology Center) and E.A. Draffan (from the University of Southampton) took place over lunch in London to explore the tasks that needed to be undertaken prior to an official meeting to take place at the AAATE Conference in Portugal between 19th-22nd September, 2013.

There was no Agenda as this was an introductory meeting.  Items discussed included:

• Magnus and E.A. to set up WordPress blog as a record of meetings, minutes, progress during the lifetime of the project with a project calendar and possible wiki links etc.- Completed in draft format
• Aejaz to explore how PCS Boardmaker symbol sets are being used in Qatar and link up with Dalal Kataari Head of Speech and Language Pathology department at Shafallah Center for Children with Special Needs.
• Aejaz will work on questions related to the symbols used by children and carers in Shafallah Centre 
• E.A. to make initial Investigations into the type of core vocabulary needed for particular groups in English initially in order see how the vocabulary may link up with the Arabic dictionary.
• E.A. to make contact with the ARASAAC developers in case they are attending AAATE in the hope of meeting up.
• Nawar to send specification for work on a free open source Arabic TTS and dictionary. 
• Investigate the need for both text with and without diacritics.