TEI Members Meeting 2011: Business Meeting Minutes
TEI-C Members's Business Meeting 2011
Date: Saturday 17 October 2010, 1700-1900
CET
Minutes taken by Daniel Paul O'Donnell
- Certification of Meeting
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The meeting was certified at 17:15. In Chair's (initial and planned) absence, Susan Schreibman acted as chair.
- Appointment of recording secretary
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Daniel Paul O'Donnell was appointed as the Recording Secretary.
- Approval of agenda
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The agenda was approved.
- Approval of last year's minutes
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The minutes from last year's meeting were approved.
- Remuneration
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None of officers has received remuneration in the last year.
- SIG Report
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- There are currently 10 SIGs, though not all are equally active (education, for example, needs a new chair).
- 7/10 SIG met in the course of the year
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Some notable successes and activities:
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Libraries:
- Received $2k from SIG grant
- used it to complete best practices document fund development of “Thutmose”, an XSLT stylesheet that follows the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries mapping.
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Music:
- Received $1.5k from SIG grant
- ran workshop on markup issues
- New proposal for element <notateMusic>
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Correspondence:
- worked on DALF and DALF P5 coompliance
- Met monthly November
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Text and Graphics:
- Revision of Facsimile markup
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Linguistics:
- Initial review of bibliography and current Guidelines
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Libraries:
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Manuscripts:
- New Working group on apparatus
- work on genetic editing
- Question of proposal to divide manuscripts group up into separate SIGs (modern and pre-modern): not decided yet.
- Council Report (Sebastian Rahtz for Laurent Romary)
- Link to slides.
- Journal Report
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- Second issue just about ready
- Plan is to publish two issues per year: 1 special issue, one proceedings
- Host reports
- Link to host reports.
- Election results (chaired by John Unsworth)
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The election results were announced. The following people were elected to the TEI Board:
- Marjorie Burghart
- Laura Mandell
- Martin Mueller
- Elena Pierazzo
The following people were elected to the TEI Council:- Brett Barney
- Gabriel Bodard
- Kevin Hawkins
- Martin Holmes
- Paul Schaffner
- Rebecca Welzenbach
JU congratulated the successful candidates and thanked all for volunteering to stand for election. The organisation is now fully member run and depends on community's willingness to volunteer.
- Chair's report
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Chair's report focussed on the questions of strategic direction that was asked of all candidates and continuing members of Board and Council:
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Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.?
One candidate suggested we should cease; all others said we should not.
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Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems?
Majority indicated yes; three indicated no; one person suggested perhaps.
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Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council?
Almost all candidates indicated yes. One person suggested that individuals should elect a single seat on the board, but otherwise not have a vote.
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Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible?
Majority said yes, in most circumstances
Three people indicated they did not think this was a good idea.
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Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group?
3 yes; 1 maybe; 6 no
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Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority?
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a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online
Priority for 2
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b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so
Priority for 1
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c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users
Priority for 3
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d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal
Priority for 2
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e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.)
Priority for 6
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f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI
Priority for 0
JU indicated that he felt this was a very useful exercise and that some clear trends had emerged for the Board and Council to consider. In most cases, the direction suggested by the candidates is something that can be accomplished (e.g. not merging Board and Council; continuing to collect fees; introduce some kind of individual participation). In other cases, action may not be in precisely the form described in questions, but in keeping with the basic underlying premise (e.g. moving towards P6, encouraging examples or tools, etc.).
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- Treasurer's Report (SW)
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Auditor's expenses (and new auditor) for 2012 were approved
Sarah Wells Gave overview of budget history and expenses for 2010 and 2011.
There was some discussion about changing nature of income and the way that some expenses--most notably the (now finished) editorial expenses from Oxford--we charged.
- Partner/Host Reports
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This is that last year that the TEI has any hosts (2011 is the last year of Lethbridge's 4 year commitment; all other host commitments ended in 2010).
SW presented outline of host and partner activity.
- Community Discussion
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A free flowing discussion followed. Some major points:
- 1 Member/1 vote? General sense in room was that this was a very important idea and direction for the TEI to go. Some discussion about whether member institutions would object to having their vote "diluted": Oxford's representative indicated that he could not see this being a problem for any member. Issue of membership price was discussed. Many people indicated that the price should almost certainly be raised, especially if this was combined with addition of voting rights. Some discussion of other membership benefits going to individuals: not all are possible/affordable: e.g. free copy of print guidelines; participation in AccessTEI.
- Priorities Room was much less keen on P6 as a priority than candidates had been. "Birnbaum doctrine" suggests that time is not here (no new advance in technology, no massive change in underlying model of Guidelines that require breaking of backward compatibility). Discussion about whether this means stasis. Or is question really one of labels: i.e. to some "P6" means "continue developing, continue innovating" while to others "P6" means more narrowly "issue new non-backwards compatible version of Guidelines." Room was in favour of continuing to innovate and develop (and members of council noted that this is ongoing); felt that attaching "P6" label to this could be mistake.
- Community building Strong sense that there is more work to be done on making TEI newcomer-friendly and continuing internationalisation efforts. Need to discuss importance of work in way that newcomers understand. Also to work on presentation for non-text-encoding decision makers. If a University president comes to our site, what does it say about our importance. Need to remember that there is a strong social aspect to project. The TEI is not just guidelines but also a community of users.
- Licencing. Sebastian Rahtz raised question of licencing. Answer is that Council is proposing a dual CC-BY and BSD licence, to be used as appropriate to application. Question was raised if this was liberal enough. To be left to Council and Board.
- Adjournment
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The meeting adjourned at 18:41.