TEI Technical Council Meeting,

Present: Hugh Cayless (HC), Fabio Ciotti (FC), James Cummings (JC), Stefanie Gehrke (SG), Martin Holmes (MH) (minutes), Sebastian Rahtz (SR), Paul Schaffner (PFS), Peter Stadler (PWS), Syd Bauman (SB). Apologies: Lou Burnard (LB), Elli Mylonas (EM).

Actions Arising

Review of actions from November face-to-face meeting

JC: Actions not completed yet cannot now be done until after the release. Main concern is actions of people not on Council.

SR: Does anyone want to claim that something they’re working on should block the release?

JC: That’s next agenda item, but we could deal with it now.

SB, JC have looked through the list but see nothing blocking.

JC: We should look at ex-Council members’ actions.

SB: I have a couple that are with RW and KH, and what I’ll do is keep working with them.

JC: Brett has Attributes without Examples with RW, so I’ll follow up on that with them. Action on JC follow up on Bug 563.

Action on JC to keep an eye on tickets that are assigned to Kevin.

Action on PFS to schedule a session with RW to work on both their outstanding tickets together, and report back if there are any she would like to have reassigned.

JC: We have a pause on any actions from the FTF which require changes to the Guidelines because of the release.

HC: I have some questions I’ll raise at the end if they don’t come up in the meantime.

JC reminds everyone that any actions past their due date should be completed by the end of February, otherwise he will wag a stern finger at the owners.

Next Release (anything blocking?)

JC: Release is timetabled in 10 days, for January 20. Some of that time should be devoted having the public look at the release and report any problems. If there are any major schema-changing reports, we make that a bug for after the release, but if there are any major issues such as missing or broken schemas then we fix that before release.

PWS now has special status and anyone wanting to make a change should now get his permission to do that through the Council list.

JC points out that there is a history of certain people making last-minute changes to P5 and the Stylesheets. Certain people admitted this and promised not to do it, but there will be a final release of the Stylesheets tonight.

JC: What you can and should do is make lots of additions to the 2.6.0 release notes, so that when we go to TEI-L with the beta announcement the notes will allow people to look specifically at what has changed.

PWS: I’m seeing myself as a total newbie in preparing the release; I will need an advisor or mentor to help with deciding what goes into the release and what doesn’t.

JC: This sort of thing will be discussed on the mailing list. Technically, you’re the one holding the keys.

SB: It’s only on the release day that it actually matters.

JC: On the actual release day, there will be lots of us who have made releases before available to help.

PWS: It’s not the 20th I’m concerned about, just the lead-up.

JC: Anyone who has anything they’d like to add to the release notes -- any changes made since July 26 last year that should be mentioned -- add them in the next day or two.

Board Report (JC)

JC: I told the Board we’re having the teleconference, and only Arianna Ciula responded to ask about the plan for the DH 2014 Hackathon. I have already talked to the DH 2014 organizers, and they want us to put it in as a pre-conference workshop. Several people have volunteered to help with that, and I named them on the message to the Board list. That’s the only thing to report from the Board.

FC: Will the hackathon proposal be assessed as a normal workshop by the DH 2014 committee?

JC: Yes, they will treat it like any other submission, and may reject it. But they were enthusiastic.

SB: There is at least one action on the hackathon on the Oxford actions list.

JC: That was on me to talk to the DH folks.

SR: We have the volunteers ready to start drafting it. We just have to do it.

JC: The deadline is 21st February, so we have to get on with it.

SR: HC and I have a conflict because we have to produce a proposal for a different workshop at the same conference. Are we proposing a one-day or a two-day workshop?

JC: We discussed it, but I can’t remember.

Action on SR to push this forward.

Council Membership (JC)

JC: This was originally titled Board representation but I guess Council membership makes more sense; this is about whether we specifically want a Board rep on the Council. I remember the consensus at the Oxford 2013 Face-to-face being that we very much want LB (the current rep) to be around working as he is; we’re not very sure whether we want a representative from the Board (as such) or not.

SR: I would say this (another formal Board rep) is counter to the constitutional changes last year, which were on the principle that everyone should be elected.

SB: I would say that having a Board rep that is appointed by the Board would be against those principles, but having Council invite someone who also happens to be a Board member isn’t.

HC agrees.

JC: We assume that any financial decisions have to get Board approval (paying for the rep’s travel etc.) but that really they’ve given us a budget for meetings and how we use it is up to us. Proposal: we have decided as Council that we don’t want a Board representative, but for the period of e.g. this calendar year, we wish to co-opt LB to work as he has been working as a non-voting member of the council and we request that he be funded for attendance at meetings.

SR: We should regard this is a temporary measure; co-opted members should be encouraged to stand for election in the normal way.

MH: Can people stand for both Board and Council?

JC: It has happened before, but without success, I believe.

MH: I think I’d like the period to be two years, because that would give us longer (in this case) to prepare for LB possibly not being involved.

JC: LB’s term on the Board comes to an end in December 2014.

SR: The principle that we should all seek validation from the members is a good one, and we should encourage everyone to take that route. A year is enough to make the transition.

MH: I agree, and withdraw the proposal for two years.

SB: As the Council exists, we have been supported by the community. If we as a body want to get some work done by farming it out to other people, I don’t see a problem with that as long as the people making that decision have themselves been elected.

JC: Of course we can co-opt people to do a specific piece of work and renew this as many times as we want.

SR: Co-opting people to do a specific job is one thing, but co-opting someone in general, as a way of extending our numbers, doesn’t seem quite right to me long-term.

JC: The consensus is that we do away with a specific Board representative, but for this calendar year (at least) co-opt LB onto the Council (if he’s willing!).

FC: Can we renew the co-option next year if we choose?

JC: Yes, of course we can co-opt anyone we choose and renew that as many times as we want. Having a maximum term of one year on any such position is a good thing, because we are forced to re-evaluate it.

HC: Maybe call this sort of position an Invited Expert.

MH: Is this (a one-year term, regarded as a precedent-setting limit) part of the proposal?

JC: Yes.

SB: I’m not sure I care to be specific about the term. But the constitution says that no position is without term.

JC: So such positions on Council should be for the calendar year unless otherwise specified. [no arguments against]

Action: JC to inform LB and TEI Board that it does not wish a Board nominated representative (other than the Council Chair) but does wish to co-opt LB as an invited expert of the community for this calendar year.

Face to Face Meetings (JC)

JC: We tend to have one around April and one around Nov., depending on availability, space, commitments, etc.

We’ve looked at list of who is on council and who has departed to see what affect that has had and concluded that we still have enough people in the US that it makes sense to have a US one, and the people joining us in Europe are not close enough that they could commute daily to a meeting at one of the other locations, so it would seem Oxford is still the best place for the European meeting because SR, JC and LB are all there. [With the caveat that if someone has an outreach event planned that would benefit the TEI that would outweigh the small amount of savings.]

We previously had a meeting at Providence RI, and that was great, but EM is not here so we can’t ask whether she’d be prepared to host again.

SB: Victoria with Martin?

MH: Too expensive for everyone but me.

JC: I’m assuming that for SB, HC and PFS, getting to the Boston/RI area is fairly easy.

PFS, HC: Both Ann Arbor and Providence are conveniently situated near transport hubs.

JC: Are you volunteering, PFS?

PFS: I’m sure we could do it; we’ve done it before.

JC: Could SB also host it at Boston?

SB: I don’t know whether this is feasible or not, because I don’t know the ropes.

JC: If there’s anyone for whom it would be beneficial, because we could also provide e.g. a local ‘TEI Day’ ahead of it, that would be a consideration. That would also be true in Europe; if there’s any location we could go where we could provide outreach benefits, that would mitigate the extra cost of travel/accommodation. Or perhaps if a local institution would cover some costs because we were speaking, etc.

HC: There has been some talk of this at Duke.

SB: Northeastern is also starting to do some TEI stuff.

PFS: What sort of time?

JC: April-May-ish, Sept-Oct-Nov-ish. We’re fairly flexible on that.

MH: But we need to make decisions because people’s schedules fill up.

PWS: We’re having a summer school in Paderborn in September, in collaboration with DARIAH-DE, and there is some money for that, so we could potentially meet at Paderborn in the fall in conjunction with it.

JC: If we could get some extra funding because we’re contributing to workshops or providing local outreach and this offsets some of the cost of travel/accommodation then that makes other locations more fiscally feasible. We’ll discuss this on the mailing list.

Action on JC to continue discussion about locations of face to face meetings.

TEI Simple project (SR)

SR has been working with Martin Mueller (MM) and others to come up with a proposal.

SR: The final proposal went to the Board and was voted on before Christmas. They voted in principle to contribute to the project to it if other fund-raising is successful; MM is now going to send this to Mellon informally and ask if they’re likely to be interested, and we’re both going to talk to people in France and Germany. If other partners come in with money, then we go back to the TEI for their contribution, but if not, then it will be abandoned. I have sent a link to the latest proposal to the Council list.

SR: If all this goes forward, we would eventually end up with something like TEI Tite or Lite, and Council would inherit it; we might then decide to retire Lite and use this instead. One of the work packages is to extend ODD anyway, so there would be a lot of input by Council.

FC: I talked to the head of ICCU (Central Institute for the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries), asking for an endorsement from the Italian ministry of culture; there is not much money available, but it could be a good thing to get an endorsement by a ministry of culture in Europe. One thing that interested me was mapping between the TEI Header in Simple and the Europeana Data Model (EDM), so we could easily prepare a stylesheet to convert between them. In Italy we have also MAG, a metadata standard for projects that goes into the Italian repository and portal for digitization projects (similar to METS, but less complex), so there should be a stylesheet to export in this format from the TEI Simple header (I’ve already done part of the work some years ago). I think that we could find some other partners in this project along these lines. Even if we cannot get money, they could endorse or sponsor the proposal. In the proposal you should specify that it will be part of the work to provide export stylesheets in various formats.

SR: This sounds excellent. We should also stress that there lots of other projects doing similar things, such as TextGrid and Dariah, and we will collaborate with all those people.

FC: I will talk with the director of the institute and let you know what response I get. Asking for money is very difficult these days, though.

JC: So SR and MM have Council’s implicit agreement to go forward with this and report back. Action on SR to move forward with TEI Simple and report back.

Text Directionality Draft (MH)

MH: Any objections to the Text Directionality Draft, or can MH and LB go forward with the rewrite of Chapter 10 after the release?

SB suggests MH & LB should wait until 1 week after release, then prompt Council with this question.

MH: Agreed. I want to get started on it early after the release, so it does get into the next release. MH encourages novices in text-directionality to look at it.

JC: One of the comments was that, compared to other chapters it is more detailed and tutorial-like. MH suggests that one reason he & LB are working on this together is that LB will be working to constrain MH’s instinct for tutorial.

Any other Business (JC)

SB asks if changes to p5odds.odd are frozen when we are in chill-mode. I wrote the versionDate constraints but failed to check it in; that doesn’;t change the Guidelines, but changes the schema we use to check the Guidelines.

HC asks for reviewers for TEI Pointers rewrite (http://hcayless.github.io/TEI-Guidelines/Guidelines-web/en/html/SA.html#SATS)

SB asks when the next conference call will be.

JC: The teleconference software is capable of recording, but I didn’t record because it’s illegal to record people without permission. We may use this in future. The recording would only be shared with the person primarily responsible for the minutes.

SB: Without wishing to be rude to MH, I wish the minutes were less detailed.

MH: Do you want to take on creating a reduced form of the minutes from my notes?

SB: Not at the moment.

JC thanks everyone for attending and reminds everyone that the minutes will be open for revision until the end of Monday, and you should make any changes you want to.