TEI Technical Council Teleconference, 2019-10-08

Meeting time

• EDT 9:00-10:30, GMT 14:00-15:30, CEST 15:00-16:30
• Started: 13:05Z; Ended: 14:32Z;

Present

• Syd Bauman (SB)
• Elisa Beshero-Bondar (EB)
• Hugh Cayless (HC)
• Nicholas Cole (NC, had to leave @ 14:13Z)
• James Cummings (JC)
• Jessica Lu (JL)
• Elli Mylonas (EM)
• Martina Scholger (MS)
• Peter Stadler (PS, had to leave @ 14:19Z))
• Sarah Stanley (SS, had to leave @ 14:13Z)
• Magdalena Turska (MT)
• Raff Viglianti (RV)

Apologies/Not Present

• Vanessa Bigot-Juloux (VB)
• Meaghan Brown (MB)

Welcome to our new Council members

• Introductions
• Mentors for new Council members
  • JL  and EB (she also has access to RV because he’s available at the same institution).
  • MB and RV.
  • NC and JC for the next 3 months, after that MS takes over.
  • TEI Council FAQ: https://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/TEI-Council-FAQ

Meeting times (including Stylesheets group meeting)

• For the remainder of the calendar year, keep with current plan: 2nd Tuesday of each month @ 13:00Z; Stylesheets 1 week earlier at the same time.

Documentation

• Action on Council: Wiki pages, for example Council FAQ, are out of date. Need to assign people to update it.
• Perhaps also add release schedule (i.e., refrigeration, freezing) into FAQ as well, no harm having it in 2 places.

Next Release

• Need to include 2 big items in next release: standOff (https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues/374) and UniHan. (https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues/1805). Timing of the release should allow time for these to be completed.
• Refrigerate last week in January? Freeze early February for release.
• RV, EB (+ newcomers shadowing).
• Action on RV and EB to schedule release.

Council terms & skill sets

• Come up with a proposal for Board concerning 3-year terms.
• Awareness of needed skill sets for Council: Nominating committee should be seeking candidates who are prepared to engage in discussions of both the technical and theoretical issues Council works on.
• Terms: Board was in favor of 3-year terms, with 1/3 of Council standing for election each year (instead of half of Council standing for election each year).
  • This would require a change to the Bylaws.
  • 11 members of Council: 4, 4, and 3 rotation.
  • How do we start it? We have 5 positions for election next year. 1, 2 and 3 year terms for some of the current Council members.
  • Should Council have 12 members? We used to have 12 members. We went to 11 to have a tie-breaker. Adding an extra person is expensive — can we afford it? (~9% increase in budget).
  • NC: tension between bringing new people on board and maintaining continuity in quality of Guidelines releases. MT: Nominating committee has pressure to ensure this works out.
  • Discussion: JC, RV: Skill sets when first standing for election don’t necessarily matter as we all have had to learn on the post. 3-year terms assists in learning process. Understanding and willingness to engage are important.
  • When someone is nominated, they need to be informed about the frequency of online and face-to-face meetings; our suggestion for the nominating committee is to include this in the invitation email.
  • And candidates who stand for election need to be told that mentorship and funding are available. And that gets you funding to the annual membership meeting.
  • Next Board Meeting on Thursday, October 10: Action on MS to inform Board that Council is in favor of 3-year terms. And propose that a Board and a Council member get together to draft what needs to be changed (policy documents, etc). JC, MS, EM will work on this drafting: due Nov 14 (proposal shown to Council earlier? The Council meeting is after the board meeting, on Nov 19)

Review UniHan issue

• Original issue (https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues/1805),
• Pull request (https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/pull/1901) from Duncan Paterson
  • Bug fixes for UnicodeName
  • Phase 0:
    • New attribute class: att.gaijiProp.xml (@name, @value).
    • Open questions: @value mandatory (see Duncan on June 30); NCName for @value?
    • New elements: <unicodeProp>, <localProp>, and <unihanProp>.
  • Phase 1:
    • Content models to allow new elements inside <char> or <glyph>
  • Phase 2:
    • Deprecation of <charProp> and <value>
  • Inheritance of attributes might be an issue? Action on SB to build the pull request locally and investigate.