TEI Members Business Meeting, October 28, 2006: Minutes

Julia Flanders reviewed the procedures for the election of new officers, and explained the ballot form. The meeting then adjourned briefly so that ballots could be distributed.

Christian Wittern, chair of the Technical Council, gave a brief report. Because many of the Council's accomplishments were mentioned in the Editor's report earlier in the program, the report focused on providing some background about the Council. The current Council members were identified, and thanked for their hard work. The Council conducts its business via a mailing list, a bi-monthly teleconference, and a yearly face-to-face meeting. Over the past year, the Council has been focused on wrapping up P5 for the 1.0 release, and thus has been doing most of the work itself, rather than assigning it to working groups.

This year's Council meeting was held in conjunction with "TEI Day in Kyoto 2006", a new type event that will hopefully inspire similar events in other cities in the coming years. The morning featured presentations by TEI users in Japan, which demonstrated the types of projects underway there and problems they confront. This was followed by a very successful and lively poster session, including many presentations from Council members, which provided a good opportunity for attendees to interact. The afternoon featured presentations by five Council members on different aspects of the TEI (I18N, personography, topic maps, etc.) The event brought together TEI users who had never met before, creating new synergies, and provided a great model for future events.

The official 2006 Council Report is available on the website.

DP gave the Treasurer's Report. The Treasurer's duties include processing membership and subscriber dues, processing reimbursements for official TEI travel, paying bills and insurance, and filing paperwork with the IRS. The rough annual budget is $100K, occasionally augmented by grant funding earmarked for specific activities. Members' fees comprise the bulk of the budget; the rest comes from subscribers' fees, host fees ($5,000 each), sales of the P4 Guidelines, and interest. Annual expenses include compensation for acccount administration, membership administration, editorial infrastructure development, and the editors' time ($60,000); insurance ($1,500); accountant's fees ($3,000); and costs for the Members' Meeting and meetings of the Council, Board, and working groups. There is currently $78,000 in the TEI account, all encumbered; we will roughly break even at the end of the year. The TEI ended last year with a budget surplus of $5,000. The Treasurer will provide more details to anyone who enquires.

The officers confirmed that they are not remunerated for their services.

There was a motion to reappoint the current auditor, KPMG, and approve the auditor's fee of $3,000 USD. The motion was carried with no opposition.

Sebastian Rahtz gave a report on the ongoing internationalization work. The goal of this work is to make it easier for non-English speakers to use the TEI. Sebastian is working with volunteers to translate element and attribute names and descriptions into five "high priority" languages (French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese), and store the translations in the ODD source of the TEI Guidelines. The ALLC has provided £10,000 to fund this work, which will produce translated <desc> and <gloss> for each element and a web application to review and update the translations. Roma's updated support for different internationalization and localization schemes was demonstrated.

The Chair declared meeting adjourned at 16:26 PDT.