TEI-C Board Minutes: 20 March 2026

Attending: Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Hugh Cayless, James Cummings (chair), Gimena del Rio Riande, Magdalena Turska

Regrets: Dimitra Grigoriou, Diane Jakacki (May be late)

Agenda Items:

  • Approval of minutes
    • MT motions for approval of last month's minutes
    • JC seconds
  • Schedule April+ Meetings?
    • Diane and Dimitra not here, so postponing this till later
  • Elections 2026
    • Dimitra and Gimena looked at the schedule and established the number of vacancies to fill for the Board and Council. D&G will start a planning document for us to review at the next Board meeting.
  • Rahtz Prize
    • Ulrike Henny volunteered to join from the Council; main thing is to get a call out in time, the full committee can be established a bit later.
    • Treasurer encourages the committee NOT to give a community prize
  • Council Report
    • F2F work on P6
    • Council very excited about P6, there's drive to put things in motion and see it to completion.
    • Start with a new abstract model, that's more consistent and logical. Expectation is that the encoded XMLs will not necessarily differ that much, but the underlying system will change drastically. Also alternative serializations will be enabled by the new model.
    • Aim is to provide a series of blueprints (schema customizations and encoding guidelines) for certain domains.
    • Big question: what are the maintenance and feature request prospects for P5, i.e. is there going to be parallel development or just maintenance for P5.
    • Forward compatibility: all features of P5 should be mappable to P6.
    • Assumption is that the timeline for P6 is years, not mere months, so obviously at least for quite a while P5 will be still developed.
    • Council will need larger chunks of time to attend to P6, therefore there will likely be an alternating Council focus - one meeting for P5 and next for P6.
    • JC: Bringing in influential community stakeholders relatively early, as first adopters/reviewers, e.g. Balisage community, can make initial communication of first results easier.
    • Enforce the imperative of customization. "No more TEI All!"
    • Easy on-board ramp: here's the blueprint for medieval manuscripts... and here for correspondence...
  • TEI Conference
    • Call for bids from reviewers about to end. There are fewer submissions (only 49) than in previous years, which might be due to the location.
    • We might encourage late-breaking poster call with minimal peer review.
    • GRR: we might suggest organizers also other activities - trainings, hacking session
    • JC: they had something as a part of the funding bid, so there might be already something planned
  • TEI By Example
    • EBB spoke with EB and Council, to let them know that at this state we cannot host TBE on TEI website
    • Community members might volunteer to give TBE a temporary home
  • Membership Drive
    • JC reports that he will close the survey and compile a report and share with board soon’ish. Responses are up to 72.
    • Shall we put up the website banner again with the donation button? (Consensus: Yes)
  • Social Media
    • DG has been posting about TEI on social media, to great effect
    • Responses from the survey about social media presence were not attributing any significance to it; there's a FB group, though not very active
    • JC: we should meet our audience where it really is, so maybe these days it's Tik Tok!
    • Let's consider between now and next meeting if we'd be able to have another communication officer
    • Have a rota of board members taking a lead
    • EBB: also posting from our own accounts when feasible connects our followers with the TEI accounts
  • JTEI
    • Still looking for a 3rd editor