Dear Council — I write to you with the concerning news that David Maus has decided to resign from the ATOP task force. I call this “concerning” rather than “sad” news because although it is sad for us (the remaining members) to lose David whom we both like and like working with, and sad for us (the TEI) to lose such an incredible talent, it is not really sad in the sense that David is not leaving for some horrible reason like he has decided that the digital humanities is a waste of time. Rather, David has decided to stop working on ATOP for reasons that I think we should be concerned about. The main reason for David’s departure is that he no longer believes that the task of writing an ODD processor is a feasible one. He spent some significant time and effort working on ATOP over the holiday break. While he made some progress, the chief result of his labors was frustration with the poor quality of the specification of ODD, namely the TEI Guidelines, specifically chapter 22, Documentation Elementshttps://tei-c.org/Vault/P5/4.7.0/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/TD.html. He believes that the poor quality of the specification makes a proper implementation impossible.[1] David also has a sense of frustration with TEI as an organization. The TEI Board has not gotten back to him on a potential collaboration, and it is taking us (the TEI Council) months and months to address some of the issues he has raised. While I share David’s frustration with the sluggishness of progress in the TEI-C, I also recognize that the work is being done by volunteers with real jobs. So I see both sides of this coin. Lastly, and in some sense most importantly, David just is not having fun doing ATOP work anymore. The good news is that David is still willing to help as an occasional as-needed consultant, and to pitch in with the jTEI publications we have already committed to. Furthermore, I am confident David will still be available as a resource to TEI when thorny Schematron issues come up. (He is one of the leading experts on Schematron, having written what many consider the premier Schematron processor in the world: SchXslthttps://schxslt.github.io/schxslt/, which I call mausatron.) I do not intend to try to replace David immediately. The ATOP task force will work with just the three of us for a few months first, and then we will discuss as a group whether we want to expand or not. Note [1] He may well be right. While the remaining members of the task force do not currently share this belief, we do all believe we might very well agree with him after diving further into the nitty-gritty details of the ODD specification. We are actually somewhat worried that after a few more meetings we may also be throwing our arms up in despair.