TEI-C 2017 Business Meeting

Wednesday, 15 November 2017

University of Victoria, Canada

Notes by Pip Willcox; Verified by Michelle Dalmau; Approved by the TEI-C Board

The Business Meeting minutes references the following presentations reports:

• TEI-C 2017 Business Meeting (PDF)
• TEI-C Technical Council & TEI-C SIGs Report (PDF)
• TEI Journal Report (PDF)
• TAPAS Report (PDF)
• TEI-C Treasurer’s Report (PDF)

Agenda

• Welcome and Opening of the Business Meeting (Michelle Dalmau, 3 mins)
• Report from the Council (Hugh Cayless, 10 mins)
• Report from the SIGs (Hugh Cayless, 10 mins)
• Reports from the TEI-C supported projects (15 mins)

• TAPAS (Julia Flanders, 7 mins)
• TEI Journal (TBD, 7 mins)

• Report from the Treasurer (John Unsworth, 25 mins)
• Election results (Michelle Dalmau, 7 mins)
• Announcing Rahtz Prize Award (Hugh Cayless and Michelle Dalmau, 10 mins)
• TEI-C Conference and Members' Meetings (15 mins, Michelle, 1 min)

• 2018 Preview (Kiyonori Nagasaki, 7 mins)
• 2019 Preview (Walter Scholger, 7 mins)

• Thank Yous and Closing the Business Meeting (Michelle Dalmau, 3 mins)

• Welcome and Opening of the Business Meeting

• Board Member Introductions: Michelle Dalmau, Hugh Cayless, Luis Meneses, Kiyonori Nagasaki, Laurent Romary, Kathryn Tomasek, John Unsworth, Pip Willcox

• MD thanks to the Board

Welcome and Opening of the Business Meeting

• The TEI-C is 30 years old this year.Awarded ADHO’s Zampolli Prize, accepted by Nancy Ides, Lou Burnard, and Michael Sperberg-McQueen on behalf of the consortium and community.
• “TEI Moments” website, started by James Cummings. Please contribute your photos to enlarge the group of people whose views we see: http://bit.ly/2yVkuV7

Report from the Council: Hugh Cayless

General

Unusually, this year the Council hasn’t yet had its second face-to-face meeting, which follows 16–17 November. Expect an improvement of bugs/issue stats after that.

• 129 open issues on https://github.com/TEIC/TEI
• Number of issues per year has steadily gone up, especially since the move to github
• A spike after each annual meeting, after SIG meetings.
• 116 issues closed in 2017
• 132 issues created so far in 2017; over half have been closed

Two Releases Since 2016

3.1.0 (December 2016)

• Completed the purification of ODD—no more direct dependence on schema language (apart from Schematron). This work was started by Lou Burnard.Completed implementation of the Processing Model and released the example using it, TEI SimplePrint.

The focus for this release was on making future releases stable rather than fixing smaller bugs.

Challenges from 2016: Update

• Stylesheets maintenance—created by Sebastian Rahtz, a monumental work of DH and TEI excellence which is hard to maintain
• Roma—helps people process ODDs into schemas is aging and needs updating. Making good progress, thanks to Raffaele Viglianti.
• Debian packages—these had been unmaintained for some time. These are now back up online.

Next Generation ROMA

• Raffaele Viglianti provided slides on Roma JS. Working prototype, hosted by MITH: http://mith.ux/romajs 
• It can import a TEI customization from the Vault or by upload, search and find elements, download the compiled ODD or schema you’ve created.
• A visual way of working with schemas. People have found it very useful.
• We may need a competition for a new name. Byzantium was an aborted attempt to update Roma so we’ll need a new name. Perhaps a return to food (nod to Pizza Chef)
• The goal is to replace Roma.How it works: a JavaScript App that runs in your browser. It goes to the Vault to find a schema to  import. Everything is local.
• There are known issues but this is early days.
• RV has a roadmap to Tokyo and what the Council will have achieved by then. RV has done the work on this to date.
• The Council is looking for help from the Community for Next Generation Roma development.

Stylesheets

• There are many issues and the face to face meeting will be used to confront this. In the end we may have to pick apart the stylesheets functionality.
• Perhaps Council will focus on building guidelines and schemas and pushing out other bits of functionality that are cool but not core operations, and maybe someone/something else should support.
• Help is very welcome on this too. This is how to help: issues pages on github repos: https://github.com/TEIC 
• Council is made up of dedicated volunteers. Not always as quick as you’d like us to be when you report a problem or ask for something new. But we do try to be thorough and commit to fixing the issues that are sent in.
• You can send pull requests as a way to engage.
• You can also engage through discussion on the mailing list.
• Even nagging helps: with prioritization

Report from Special Interest Groups

• New SIGs this year

• Graph technologies: Andreas Kuczera
• Indic Texts: Patrick McAllister and Andrew Ollett
• East Asian / Japanese (KN and Charles Muller)

• SIG started a new series TEI seminar for beginners and working with some Japanese TEI resources
• The SIG started work on a set of Japanese guidelines (not just of P5 guidelines).

• Newspapers? A prospective SIG coming out of the Victoria conference

• Libraries SIG (Kevin Hawkins & Stefanie Gehrke) subgroup have been working on updating the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries.

• Both leaders need to step down. We are looking for volunteers to lead this SIG.

• Ontology (Christian-Emil Ore)

• Need for more discussion on semantics and TEI, object descriptions etc.

• Manuscripts: Dot Porter and Gerrit Brüning

• Porter steps down as convener and Stephen McCormick takes over

• Linguistics: Piotr Bański and Andreas Witt

• Very active this year with a number of proposals before the Council
• Particularly interested in hooking into the TEI Council infrastructure (Jenkins server space) so they can know how well their stuff is working as they make commits to their own repository.

• How can the Council support the SIGs’ missions?
• How do SIG proposals get represented to Council?
• Peter Stadtler suggests designated Council members to present ideas from various SIGs to Council and be responsible for it. This will be discussed in the upcoming Council meeting.

Report on TAPAS by Julia Flanders

• Full access to TAPAS is a benefit of TEI membership

• Hoping this is something TAPAS can contribute to the membership drive

• Provides long-term repository storage to TEI data. A benefit to the TEI-C as well as its members.
• Numbers cautiously up (problem with spam) including students.
• Largely thanks to Dinah Craik project, many more files than previously.
• Informal report that TAPAS is a reason that people are signing up to TEI, or changing from individual to institutional membership.

• Need to track when people join TEI because of TAPAS.

• Brief recap:

• in process of finishing migrating from Drupal/Fedora to Samvera/Fedora implementation. Fits in with Northeastern University’s IT stack, so they can more readily support the TAPAS infrastructure.
• Expand range of viewing options for TAPAS in future.

• Want to enlist community in that endeavor as well.

• Working towards TAPAS as repository (not just publication through projects).

• How one might view a very large collection of diverse data?
• The TEI members and community might be interested in TEI instances, ODDs—large scale views of usage.
• Validation as way of viewing and reporting files.
• Data curation workflows applied to many files and part of their ongoing maintenance and development

Report on JTEI by Michelle Dalmau, on Behalf of the Editors

• The journal is in various publication states across issues:

• n. 11: in progress.
• n. 9: 1 article of introduction pending
• n. 10: 4 articles pending

• TEI-C currently supports journal by providing copy editing
• New request to fund support for a managing editor
• Three genres and so three sorts of reviewers for them:

• Data sets
• research articles
• project/tool note

• Workflow updates:

• New review forms for each type of submission
• Investigating post-publication processes for updating revisions to articles while still maintaining a link to the previous, published version
• Series of fixes to stylesheets etc. all tracked on GitHub (https://github.com/TEIC)

• pureODD is running

• Thanks to Board for financial and other support, guest editors and journal staff.
• Journal needs reviewers: https://journal.tei-c.org/journal/user/register

Questions

• Would the journal publish articles not from the conference?

• Calls for special issues have gone out with low response. Could go beyond conference (sitting audience) for special issues.
• John Walsh is also on DHQ editorial board and is hoping to introduce DHQ practices and processes to the JTEI. (Julie Flanders)
• JTEI: not exclusively about the conference. Open to an article on whatever research. You just need to submit it. (Elisa)

• Welcome dataset publication.

• Putting good, reviewed TEI data will become an amazing function of the journal. (Elli Mylonas)

Treasurer’s Report: John Unsworth

• Treasurer’s report presented with Tim Naughton from Virtual Inc. who tuned in remotely. (Virtual, Inc. now manages the TEI-C administrative overhead with an emphasis on finances).
• Rundown of membership: part of the duties of the treasurer that will in future be managed by the Membership Coordinator (from the Board).
• Stopped tying membership to institution size several years ago
• Top levels of membership ($5k, $3k, $1500). These have kept level.
• Seen fluctuation in lower tiers of membership: individuals ($50), supporters ($250) and contributors ($500)
• Institutional membership are conceived as bundles. For example, $500 = 10 members you can sign up. Meaningful because individual members can register discount on TAPAS membership, discount on conference fees, oxygen license.

• We need to encourage institutions to use their individual members slots.

• Paid up institutions:

• 79 in 2015
• 69 in 2016
• 60 in 2017

• Drop off in lower levels. Financially we haven’t cratered on account of that, but it is a  trend we need to see reversed.

• Supporter ($250) & Contributor ($500) levels, especially

• Individual members (used to be subscribers):

• 252 in 2015
• 212 in 2016
• 108 in 2017

• Drop for individual membership is extraordinary and merits further investigation.  Wild Apricot (membership software) needs some attention especially for people who received a free membership for one year from a TEI-C-sanctioned workshop.  These types of members may not be allowed in the system to renew and become individuals for some reason.
• Sustaining partners ($500)

• 5 (2015), 4 (2016) and 5 (2017)

• Patrons ($2,500)

• 2 (2015),  2 (2016),  4 (2017)

• Friends ($1,500)

• 10 (2015), 9 (2016), 9 (2017)

• Suggestion: we talk to smaller institutional members who have dropped off to understand why they are not renewing.

Expenses for 2016

• Calendar year 2016 is the fiscal year. All costs in USD.

• Council travel - $21,468.23
• TAPAS - $15,000

• late on paying previous year so actually paid them both this year

• Conference subvention: $7,444
• Board travel: $1,781

• members cover a lot of their own travel (thank you!)

Balances Over Time

• Moving from Bank of America to Citizens Bank. Save money over the year for bank transfer fees.
• Citizens allows other people to access funds, not just the Treasurer
• We’re doing fine financially.

• Seeing declines in individual and lower tiers of membership.
• Adding expenses: $1500/month for Virtual, Inc. support.
• Need to raise membership levels

• Major expenses, with TEI Council at top, TAPAS second reflects appropriate spending according to what the TEI does and user survey.
• Average balances:

• $218,500 (2015)
• $232,000 (2016)
• $221,770 (2017)

• Moving forward, Virtual, Inc. will provide official profits/loss balance sheets.
• We will consider ways to invest the $200,000 balance that just not sitting in a bank or low-interest account.
• Virtual, Inc. will help the Board with budgeting, including forecasting, etc., which is something the Board has never done officially.  

• Outcome: A plan on how to budget on larger framework, advancing needs of the TEI.

Tim Naughton, Virtual Finance, Inc.

• Senior financial analyst at Virtual
• In 2018, Virtual will work with Board on actual vs. budgeted expenses to map out next year and compare to where we want to be.
• Budgeting important next step for the organization. Event planning, client services, membership, those services too.
• Right now TEI is only using finance and accounting services from Virtual.
• Balance sheet: A snapshot in time, for 31 October.

• $217k in bank and paypal
• That looks good but we should go more in depth
• Need to consider cash reserve.

• Calculate cash reserve: look at projected annual expenses, divide by 12 (months), and see if the organization can pay its way with the cash it has available.
• Yes, because there isn’t much overhead. We’re a frugal organization. Benchmark is 6 months. We came back at 64 months. We’re doing well, but now a slew of other questions.
• Do we need this much cash available? JU and TN will look at opportunities for creating money market account, investment account.

• This will be presented to board before deciding anything. There are options here.

• $20k pending or overdue for renewal
• Little in terms of liability.

• Came across some expenses and wasn’t sure where to apply them ($560) went into liability account as a stopgap. JU will advise.

• Does the cash match what was in the bank at start/end of month? Yes to within $160. Small timing issue sometimes, so numbers don’t always match exactly in a snapshot.

• As of October (not December): important is membership dues. Numbers don’t fully match but you can see the trend.

• Decline in membership. Virtual will help turn downward trend around.

• Expenses look good.

Questions

• KT: discrepancy due to paying TAPAS late? Yes.
• Given that trend, Virtual is coming in at a good time. Over next 2–3 years we’ll see if this was a good arrangement. JU is optimistic.

Chair of TEI-C Board of Directors, Michelle

• Board will meet after this meeting. We’ll be discussing membership drive by the start of next year. Once we have consensus on our approach, we’ll send summary to list and would welcome comments.
• MD resigned on JU’s behalf. JU has been in transition.
• We’ll be issuing a sensible role for treasurer’s call. Please apply!

Elections

• Spots to fill for 2018:

• Board: 2
• Council: 6
• TAPAS: 2
• Fantastic slate of candidates. Thank you for standing. Seeing new people and faces to this and for the community as a whole.

• Council has 10 candidates standing for election.  The following won elections:

• Elisa Beshero-Bondar
• James Cummings
• Elli Mylonas
• Martina Scholger
• Peter Stadler
• Magdalena Turska

• Board has 5 candidates stand for election. The following won:

• Kathryn Tomasek
• Georg Voegler

• TAPAS has 2 candidates stand for election. The following won:

• John Russell
• Magdalena Turska

• Voter turnout improved from 2016 though membership was down:

• from 31 to 45% individual members
• From 39 to 45% institutional voting

• It’s become a “tradition” that we encounter hiccups when setting up for elections. We are working on clarifying the steps.

• Potential for human error:

• Extracting information from membership database and input this into opavote.
• Complete slate is published (improved over the years by using Google forms to gather the information)
• Challenge for institutional members: designated individual to vote within institution. Currently, we reply on the institutional member contact who may not be an active part of the TEI Community (i.e., a person responsible for paying fees) to disseminate the ballots.

• Q: Post institutional reps for each of the members.
• A: Wild apricot provides a directory. Display could be modified to display individual names.

• Thanks to:

• outgoing members of council and board.
• Election committee: no veterans in this group! Chaired by KN and Alejandro Bia, Hugh Cayless, Luis Meneses, Laurent Romary.

Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity, Michelle Dalmau & Hugh Cayless

• In his memory and to celebrate his philosophical and technical contributions Sebastian Rahtz made to the TEI community.
• 6 nominations. 5 applied for prize.
• Awards Panel: Gabby Bodard, Hugh Cayless, and Michelle Dalmau
• Prize other than glory: $1000 USD or equivalent
• Honorable mention (created on the fly due to excellence of submissions)

• EVT Edition Visualization Technology project http://evt.labcd.unipi.it

• Prize: (introduced by Hugh Cayless)

• coreBuilder by Raffaele Viglianti, MITH
• Make it easier to work with stand-off markup
• Overlapping hierarchies still a problem.
• Raff has ingeniously developed a tool to help projects he works with deal with this.
• We like it’s small and modular not big and overarching architecture.
• Terrific in lots of ways.

• RV will donate funds to charity: cancer research in the UK
• We will be doing this again in 2018. Call for nominations in April. Hoping this will incentivize even further new projects.

2018 and 2019 TEI MM and Conference Previews

• University of Tokyo 2018 - Kyonori  Nagasaki
• University of Graz 2019 - Walter Scholger

University of Tokyo in 2018

•  http://conf2018.jadh.org/
• Japan in the middle of Europe, Australia, Americas.
• Tokyo National Institute of Informatics
• 9–13 September
• 400 people for keynote lecture on 10 sept
• Keynote: Turning point for cultural resources in japan
• Conference area is surrounded by antique books stores - jimbocho - mostly Japanese classics, western books too
• Hope to have opportunities to make it global, spread TEI amongst East Asian researchers
• Especially we expect that good models of tools, methods, thoughts and other aspects will be shared with this community

TEI 2019 Goes to Graz

• University of Graz has been teaching TEI since 2006
• No whales, no kangaroos, but there are Styrian mountain goats

• This is an Austrian joke; The German acronym for the Humanities Asset Management System at UniGraz is the name of the mountain goat native to the region--GAMS (Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management System). https://goo.gl/images/JyGXME

• Graz is the capital of Styria, which is the second largest province in Austria
• Gateway to the Balkans. Attract Slovenian colleagues to conference
• 900 years of history, best preserved city centre in Europe
• Historical and modern: medieval clock tower, renaissance castle, largest medieval armory
• Friendly alien: Kunsthaus of Contemporary Art

• Modern architecture in middle of river

• Surfing (joke image)
• 2010 UNESCO city of design, of 18 in the world; World heritage site
• 1585 university, 2nd oldest and 2nd largest univ in Austria
• Campus: new and old
• Reflected in inner architecture and lecture halls.
• Graz in south of Austria. 30 miles from Slovenian border. Tiny airport. Fairly easy to get there, including direct train from Vienna airport through the Alps. 2.5 hours.
• Good service by Graz tourism agency. Own booking platform.
• Castles and chocolate factory, vineyards and Admont abbey
• 16–20 september 2019

Wrap Up Questions

• Good to have new blood:  but the Council doesn’t have new blood. Is it worth considering a different model that promotes new perspectives to the Council? Standing for election becomes challenges when you are up against the usual suspects.

• Make a proposal: urge the board to institute an amendment to bylaws: where there are only returning incumbents are elected and go down the list to the next most voted for person and pick them exceptionally.