TEI Members Meeting 2004: Minutes

Geoffrey Rockwell and Patrick Durusau were appointed to sign off on these minutes. The minutes from the 2003 Business Meeting were approved.

The vice chair and a volunteer were recruited to help with the counting of votes, Geoffrey Rockwell and Dolores Iorizzo. It was announced that due to an error, Matthew Driscoll was incorrectly listed as being up for reelection to the TEI Council. His term in fact ends on December 31, 2005. In addition, only 4 seats on the Council are to be filled in this election. Because the TEI now uses instant run-off voting, electors were instructed to vote for six Council candidates, to result in the election of four new Council members.

The results of the election were:

While the votes were being counted, Susan Schreibman chaired a session on the TEI Special Interest Groups (SIGs). The SIGs that reported were:

• Overlapping Markup - Dorothy Carr Porter
• Digital Libraries - Perry Willett
• Presentation Tools - Matthew Zimmerman
• CIDOC CRM and Ontologies - Oyvind Eide
• Manuscripts - Susan Schreibman
• Training (now TEI Education) - Susan Schreibman

Julia Flanders announced that Susan Schreibman has agreed to act as the TEI's first SIG coordinator. She will gather reports from the SIGs and make contact with them during the course of the year.

There was discussion about the possibility of creating a wiki space for the SIGs, to facilitate group authoring and maintenance of materials. It was agreed that this was an area to explore during the next year. The issue was raised again this year of consolidating the SIG mailing lists, and it was agreed that this was desirable.

The current Chair, Julia Flanders, distributed her report (MM26), included in the meeting program. In it she thanked the previous Chairs (Harold Short and John Unsworth). She also announced upcoming changes to the TEI hosts, at the conclusion of the first four-year host term. On behalf of the TEI Consortium she thanked the University of Bergen, the staff of AKSIS, and in particular Tone Merete Bruvik, Claus Huitfeldt, Alois Pichler, and Daniel Apollon, for the hard work and dedication they have given to the TEI during their term as host.

Flanders announced the venue for the 2005 TEI Members Meeting, which will be held in Sofia, Bulgaria, hosted jointly by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Sofia University. She mentioned that this year for the first time the TEI held a formal bidding process for the meeting, which attracted a number of very strong proposals.

Flanders mentioned the continuing urgency of membership recruiting to keep the TEI funded. At present the hosts are still providing a disproportionate and unsustainable level of support for the TEI, and it is crucial that we find ways to increase membership in order to enable the TEI to maintain its level of activity.

Sebastian Rahtz, host representative from Oxford University and a member of the TEI Council, presented a report on behalf of Christian Wittern, Chair of the TEI Council, who was unfortunately prevented from attending the meeting by a taifun. We heard reports on the progress of the Character Encoding Workgroup, the Stand-Off Markup Workgroup, the Migration Workgroup, the Manuscript Description Task-force, the Metalanguage Workgroup, the Joint IS)/TEI Activity on Feature Structures, and the Workgroup on Physical Bibliography

None of the host representatives had anything to add to the written reports.

The Treasurer, Daniel Apollon, presented his a report on the year ending Dec. 31, 2003, a status report on 2004, and a draft budget for 2005. He noted that the budget for 2005 is extremely cautious, in view of the flattening curve of new memberships, and suggested that if membership fees increase more steeply it may be possible to amplify the budget in response.

The officers confirmed that they are not remunerated.

The current auditor (KPMG) was reappointed and the auditor's fee was approved.

Matthew Driscoll and David Birnbaum spoke briefly about the venue for the 2005 members meeting, which will be jointly hosted by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Sofia University in Sofia, Bulgaria. Driscoll spoke warmly of the attractions of the region and indicated that although travel to Sofia may be more expensive than for some meetings in the past, the costs for lodging and food will be much less than usual. The date of the meeting is still to be determined, but it is expected to be sometime in October 2005.