On 03/08/15 21:15, Hugh Cayless wrote:
I Presumably then, you’re against being an invited expert again should you not be re-elected? :-)
Well, I am not against it in the sense of thinking it would be wrong to be asked; whether I would accept the request would depend on all sorts of other factors.
Personally, once off the Council list, I’m probably never going to look at it again unless someone specifically asks me to.
That's obviously a matter of personal choice. However, as Martin remarks, there are several existence proofs both for ex-Council members who never re-appear, and for several who do (e.g. Piotr, Laurent...)
I think we do way too much development work "in secret" and I’d like to find ways to broaden the community of TEI power users. That’s a different discussion though.
I am not sure what you mean by "in secret". The Council's list and its repositories are all open and public.
This is nothing we have to decide now, so we can wait to hear everyone’s opinion, and I agree that would be a very good thing.
I’ll just make two more points:
1) I am vehemently against asking anyone, e.g. Martin, to do work in support of Council’s mission without being formally recognized for it. I know he’ll do it anyway, because he’s an incredibly generous person, but I feel strongly that there ought to be a way that he can get credit for it and that he be able to say to his employer: "See, I’m doing this valuable work and it’s recognized by the TEI as such".
This situation comes with the territory though: we are an open source project. I rather suspect that letters from the TEI don't cut much ice with most employers when it comes to justifying use of time : if your boss has heard of and approves of the TEI, that's likely to count for a lot more (and fortunately this seems to be increasingly likely). But what do I know.
2) Would it not be more of a disaster to have a Council without the skills to implement their decisions and without any support or ways to acquire such skills?
Yes. One can imagine many disastrous scenarios. The point is though that a Council which is incapable of understanding the technical architecture of the TEI is not doing its job.