I think I agree with most of this (I usually do agree with MH!) But am skeptical about a 'contributors' list'; I see no reason techie discussions should not take place on TEI-L, which is hardly prone to excessive traffic, where they would raise the general tone and educate, by osmosis. pfs On Thu, Dec 3, 2015, at 17:00, Martin Holmes wrote:
Hi Hugh,
Thanks for getting all this going. I'm actually looking forward to being more active next year than I have been recently, because I'll no longer be the managing editor of the Journal, so I hope to be a good test case for staying involved.
I don't think contributors should attend telcos or FtFs except in rare cases where they might be brought in for part of a meeting to talk about a specific issue. As we discovered today, there are technical limitations on the number of participants in a telco, and in any case, when too many people are present, some folks inevitably become less willing or able to contribute (I'm thinking especially about people whose first language is not English, and might get lost when discussions get too voluble or too many people are speaking.)
I'm in two minds about whether contributors should remain on the mailing list. If it gets too large, discussions will become incoherent and inconclusive. There's the obvious issue of who decides who should be on it and who shouldn't. And the fact that this is the Council mailing list means that it should really only host Council deliberations.
There are some alternatives that might be workable, though. We could have a Contributors mailing list, to which one designated member of Council would subscribe for the purposes of acting as a bridge to Council (others might subscribe too if they're interested). This would have to be clearly distinguished in intent from the regular TEI-L; it would be for expert-level discussions, and perhaps restricted initially only to people who have been on Council, and who can therefore be expected to understand to some degree how the repos and build processes work. Alternatively, we might consider it also as a pathway onto Council; people might join that list and learn how to contribute and how things work, and then use their demonstrated willingness to contribute as a factor in their election run for Council. You could have a pathway such as:
- Read the list - Ask to join it and be added - Read documentation and learn about git etc. - Be assigned some straightforward tickets - Carry them out - Stand for Council in the next election
That would ease the transition onto Council as well as off. People who never got to the ticket stage, or who never completed tickets assigned to them, could be removed from the list after a specific period, presumably after learning that it's not for them.
There are other aspects of cycling off Council that need to be considered. I have credentials to access the tei-c.org server. Should I lose those? Ideally there should be a periodic review (perhaps once a year) of everyone holding such credentials, and the Council would decide whether they ought to continue to have them.
Cheers, Martin
On 15-12-03 01:37 PM, Hugh Cayless wrote:
Dear All,
Thanks for the productive meeting earlier today. I’d said I wanted to broach the topic of keeping Contributors engaged over email, partly because it’s been a little contentious in the past and partly because I think it’s something that deserves more deliberation than we can give it in a single meeting. I’ll start by setting out how (as I understand it) things work now and then paint a picture of things as I’d like them to be. I mean the latter as something for you all to react to, so don’t hesitate to do so. I’d particularly like reactions from those of you who are new to Council. This is really going to be an ongoing conversation, I believe, and not something we can just fix. Martin has volunteered to be a champion for Contributors and I’m hoping that he and any other outgoing members who want to remain active participants will be vocal about what works and what doesn’t work for them. Council is a highly effective group that does a lot of good work, so we need to find a balance that doesn’t mess with our effectiveness and cohesiveness.
The status quo:
Engagement with TEI work happens via the TEI and Stylesheets repos on GitHub. Each of these has issue trackers, and there are two teams that have access to make changes to TEI, the Technical Council and "TEI Contributors". Incidentally, if the new folks will send me their github ids, I’ll add you to the Council team. The Tech Council team is for current Council members and the Contributors team is for a) former Council members who wish to remain active and b) anyone else we decide should have the ability to push directly to the TEI repo. This being GitHub, we can also take pull requests from people on neither team. Discussion of TEI stuff happens on this mailing list, on the issue trackers, in our monthly telecons, and in our Face to Face meeting. Only current Council members are on the mailing list, and people are removed as they cycle off Council. Only Council members attend the telecons and the F2F meetings, though occasionally "outside experts" are invited. Council tends to operate on consensus, though from time to time contentious issues are put to a vote.
My ideal world:
Contributors would be able to be as involved as they want to be in ongoing TEI development. That might include staying on or joining the mailing list, attending telecons, and even F2F meetings (though the TEI wouldn’t be able to pay for them unless they were formally invited of course). The main difference between Council Members and Contributors would be that the former have a vote when things come to a vote and would in general have more responsibility for development and maintenance.
I feel that we don’t do enough to foster an active community of people who are TEI experts, and I think part of that is Council being a bit mysterious and exclusionary. It’s hard to get onto Council, especially if you’re not already part of a community of TEI users (so that you have name recognition in the elections) and people who leave have tended to just drift away (often leaving unfinished business).
As I mentioned above, we’ve had a version of this discussion before, and I think mine was a minority view then, but I wanted to raise it again now to get the reactions of our incoming members and the perspectives of our outgoing members. What should we do? As you might have guessed, I have strong opinions, so I’m going to shut up for a while in the hope that a productive discussion develops without me driving it :-).
-- tei-council mailing list tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council
PLEASE NOTE: postings to this list are publicly archived -- Paul Schaffner Digital Library Production Service PFSchaffner@umich.edu | http://www.umich.edu/~pfs/