TEI-C Business Meeting Minutes: Lyon, France 2015-10-31

Hackathon

The first hackathon was held at Sydney, DH 2015; organized by James Cummings and run by Martin Holmes — main group transformed OCR output files into TEI and rendered fulltext side-by-side facsimile page images. Content available online. Renders in dark red where OCR was less confident in its output.

The data is here:https://github.com/TEIC/Hackathon/tree/master/DH2015 and the output: http://web.uvic.ca/~mholmes/teiHackathon2015/cinders/cinders.xml.

The hackathon is seen as an important outreach activity. Spontaneous and therefore responsive to needs of those who are keen and participating. Not sure whether we will do another Hackathon for DH 2016 in Krakow.

TAPAS

The TEI-C provides financial support and governance support for TAPAS. TAPAS offers services for managing, storing, and displaying TEI-encoded texts especially in response to smaller institutions with limited resources. Report from Julia Flanders forthcoming.

TEI Simple

At this conference, there’s been a few presentations about TEI Simple, which is a TEI specification (schema and processing instructions) created to make TEI more approachable or for large-scale digitization. Report from James Cummings and Martin Mueller forthcoming.

Free Memberships with TEI Training

In order to support people engaging with TEI projects under the umbrella of the TEI-C, people who attend TEI-branded workshops are provided a free individual memberships for one year. Anyone can organize a TEI-branded workshop. If you are a workshop organizer it is important that you get in touch with the TEI-C so we can post to the calendar events and promote the workshop as an official TEI event. Early contact will also facilitate the one-year free membership offer for workshop participants.

EP explains some of the challenges with managing these individual memberships. The process has many points of failures and the Board will be discussing ways to improve the membership process as a whole. It is important for the TEI-C to continue to encourage participation in this way. We value this and will continue to look for outreach and engagement opportunities as a way to be an active part of the TEI community.

Questions (Q) / Comments (C) from Audience and Answers (A):

C: Feeling uneasy about granting voting rights through these free memberships to people who are “clueless” about the TEI.
A: That’s democracy.

Q: What percentage of people voting in this election are new members?
A: Maybe 15% are eligible to vote in the Council election. We only now have a year’s worth of data that we can analyze to determine voting patterns of new members.

C: Voting may be influenced and favor those who do more teaching and outreach for the TEI-C.

C: Recommendation for reduced fees for attending the conference instead a one-time, one year free membership. Expressed concern for new people getting involved in deep organizational issues that comes with voting.

C: Some anecdotally revealed that they were consulted because new members did not know who to vote for. Others in the audience agreed with this sentiment.

C: Many in the audience feel that the benefits far outweigh the concerns. The TEI is the way it is because of participation.

EP interjects and states that the TEI-C Board will monitor this and calculate the ratio of free membership v. voting.

Q: Often people who are given a free membership have been aware of the TEI for some time. Should one have to pay for voting? Not having paid does not mean there’s a lack of knowledge.

John Unsworth (JU) emphasized that the free membership is just one year.

The comments, questions and answers were heard and will be further discussed during tomorrow’s TEI Board meeting.

TEI Simple

Martin Mueller reports on TEI Simple. TEI-Simple is Sebastian Rahtz’s brainchild in its conception and execution driven by the question: Could you use a processing model toward an 80/20 implementation? TEI Simple proposal presented to TEI-Board to cost-share a low 6-figure project funded by Mellon. TEI Simple also has support from the University of Nebraska. The project started in September 2014 with an advisory committee meeting.

The first major TEI Simple use case is by Joe Wicentowski from the United States Office of the Historian. Joe migrated a data set to Simple and his code was reduced by ⅔.

Martin concludes by saying that TEI Simple is not all that simple. TEI Nudge, its previous name — better expresses its ethos. The idea is to present people with default options with the ability to opt-out.

TAPAS

Julia Flanders reports on TAPAS (see report presented to 2015 TEI-C Business Meeting for more information).

• 128 registered users
• 450 TEI files
• 27 TAPAS projects

TAPAS is a free benefit with TEI-C Membership. People are joining the TEI to get access to TAPAS (anecdotally, would like to verify this with the membership data).

TAPAS 2.0 offers a repository service, 20 year no-cost, unlimited quantity of TEI data, for free.

Next steps: NEH start-up for TAPAS to support pedagogical functions. Support annotation and open-notebook. Interested in our ideas!

Questions from Audience

Q: Will you use the TEI Simple Processing Model for TAPAS?
A: Yes, we will look into it. At minimum, harmonizing features such as the rendition functions. Integrating TAPAS with GitHub will be helpful.

TEI Journal

Martin Holmes is reporting on behalf of John Walsh (see report presented to 2015 TEI-C Business Meeting for more information). It will be Martin’s last report as Managing Editor.

• Publication of “monster issue 8” (15 articles and intro; 13 of which have been published)
• Adopted a rolling publishing model for first time. Would like to keep using this model for future issues
• When all articles for issue 8 are published, we will reorganize it into thematic sections (not done before, but will do it in the future)
• Have articles for Issue 9 under review (Evanston conference) and Issue 10 (thematic issue)
• Ron, Technical Editor, completed JTEI authoring tools in P5 and schema with Oxygen integration
• All recent articles are available in TEI/XML
• Workflow is now all-ODT

Elena reads a message from John Walsh — a special thank you to Martin Holmes, who is stepping down as the Managing Editor.

Report from Social Media Coordinator (delayed)

EP explains that Paul couldn’t be here for personal reasons. He’s the voice of Twitter and Facebook for TEI-C. His position as Social Media Coordinator will be coming to an end. The TEI-C Board will issue a call for a new Social Media Coordinator. Fun way to get involved with the TEI-C — volunteer position with conference attendance support from the TEI-C.

Amended: Paul O'Shea provided the TEI-C Board of Directors with a report covering social media impact and activities for 2014–2015.

Report from the Treasurer

John Unsworth reports on financial matters: FY is 2014 and some 2015 (see report presented to 2015 TEI-C Business Meeting for more information). Most if not all income comes from membership. Levels of membership range from Individual $50 to Sustaining Partners ($5,000).

• 79 institutional members in 2015
• In 2012, had 45 paid institutional members
• Attributes the shift to Wild Apricot, new Membership Tracking software, which has improved and more accurate reporting mechanisms
• 22 paid-up members in 2012
• 252 paid-up in 2015
• Approximately 50 people/year as a workshop benefit for people who have never been a member

The TEI-C has filed its 2014 tax return, carrying annual paperwork in the state of virginia in 2,000 (Virginia-based 501c-3).

When TEI-C plays banker for the conference, it causes interesting fluctuations.

The TEI-C is always keen to hear about ideas for using money for benefit of the community — investment opportunities, investing in projects like TAPAS, TEI Simple … open call for people to improve the life of TEI.

Questions from Audience

Q: Factoring in the CD cash-out; 2015 membership fees due end of year, do we have other investments? A: No other investments (CDs). JU recommends hiring an investment firm.

Election Results

Nick Homenda is now closing the ballots. EP introduced Nick with much gratitude for lost of hurried and last minute voting adjustments.

• Elected members for the Board of Directors:
  • Kathryn Tomasek
  • Pip Willcox
• Elected members for the Technical Council:
  • Elisa Beshero-Bondar
  • Peter Stadler
  • Magdalena Turska
  • James Cummings
  • Elli Mylonas
  • Martina Scholger
• Elected Members for the TAPAS Advisory Board:
  • Magdalena Turska
  • Elena Gonzalez-Blanco
  • Molly O’Hagan Hardy
  • Susanna Allés-Torrent

EP profusely thanks for all the people who stood for election. It was refreshing to get new people and a great show for gender balance. EP encourages people who were not elected try again next year. The TEI-C needs new people!

EP briefly discusses some of the voting glitches this year. The nomination process was more challenging than usual this year with 45 people nominated to stand for election. Unfortunately, someone was left out of the ballot so the ballot for Council had to be regenerated a couple of days after voting was announced. The Board will be discussing ways to improve the election process and is also considering changing the elections timeline.

The TEI-C Website

Kevin Hawkins introduced himself and Nick Homenda as the TEI webmasters. He explained that the TEI-C website needs to be completely overhauled: it was developed a number of years ago and is becoming obsolete. This is on the agenda for tomorrow’s Board meeting. In the meantime, he asks that people contact them at web@tei-c.org if they find anything on the site in need of updating.

Management of the TEI-C and Financial Matters

Currently managing business operations for the TEI-C is burdensome and John Unsworth (JU) is carrying much of this burden. The TEI-C’s legal address is tied to his home address for historical reasons having to do with the organization’s non-for-profit status. We also need to think of investments. This is a main agenda item for tomorrow’s Board meeting.

One option is to outsource some or much of this work, but these third-party services may be costly.

JU clarified the workload. One issue is the amount of work that the Treasurer is doing to manage membership. Though related financially, administratively these tasks should be managed by different people with a close working relationship.

Questions from Audience

Q: Is the Treasurer’s job portable? Does it pass to someone gracefully ever year or every two years or not change hands very often.
A: Person needs to have access to the bank, which would require in-person setup. Someone who persists would be best with possible turnover every 3 years at a minimum.

Projects & Activities

Always an open call for grants: tool building, SIG work, etc.

Timing of Elections

The Board is considering making elections earlier in the year to support face-to-face meetings for existing Board and Council members and new members. However, this consideration has implications on our budget. Adjusting the timing would also minimize last-minute voting overhead that can be stressful and hard to manage.