Re: [tei-council] Council's Future

4 Aug 2015

      Hi Hugh,

On just this issue:
...
...
No, not really; it's the same sort of discussion. In the past,
we've had some difficulty in keeping ex-members engaged after they
left Council, and there are probably a number of possible reasons
for that: 1) they left because they were tired of it and wanted a
break; 2) they stood for election but weren't elected, and were
understandably a bit upset by that and backed away; 3) without the
official title and role of Council member they couldn't justify the
time to their employer or institution. We can't do much about #1,
but with a slightly more formal system for recognizing and
encouraging continued involvement, as you suggest below, we can
mitigate #3 and possibly even #2 (people might voluntarily step
down knowing they could more easily stay involved anyway).
I’ve always found that aspect of the TEI weird. On most software-type
projects, there aren’t any barriers to contributing other than that
your contribution is deemed worthwhile, and if you contribute enough,
they give you your own set of keys. In the TEI, you (more or less)
can’t contribute unless you win a popularity contest. I think an
elected Council is a good thing in many ways, as it’s the whole
community who gets to decide who leads it, but it’s bad in that
potential contributors get locked out. I’d like to see some sort of
hybrid, where the leaders are elected, but the contributors can join
in and be recognized.
We're not a software project, though; we're a community-based standard. 
Successful software projects, especially large, complex ones, tend to 
have fairly strong-minded leaders (Linux springs to mind), with 
tyrannical powers; we eschew that in favour of a more consensual 
approach, but we certainly don't license anyone to add anything they 
like to the TEI. We're much closer to something like the Unicode 
Consortium in that respect. Anyone can propose something, and even 
implement it (as a customization in our case, and in the PU area in the 
case of Unicode), but for it to be formally adopted requires a process 
of approval by a small group of folks delegated to perform that role. 
That group has to be smallish to be effective, and it has to represent 
the community adequately, but it must have tyrannical power if the 
standard is to remain at all coherent.

I've also been talking too much and listening too little. Over and out. :-)

Cheers,
Martin

On 15-08-03 02:59 PM, Hugh Cayless wrote:
...
I think I’ve talked too much and listened not enough, so I’ll go
quiet after this and hope the discussion continues productively...
...
On Aug 3, 2015, at 17:07 , Martin Holmes  wrote:
On 15-08-03 01:15 PM, Hugh Cayless wrote:
...
I don’t have a "view" other than what I expressed in my last
email. Just some concerns and ideas for discussion. Presumably
then, you’re against being an invited expert again should you not
be re-elected? :-)
When Lou wasn't on Council, when he was present at meetings, he
didn't have voting rights. I remember everyone teasing him about
it.
That’s true, but in practice it doesn’t mean much. We tend to operate
on consensus rather than taking votes on everything. Again, I’m not
suggesting having permanent Council members!
...
...
Personally, once off the Council list, I’m probably never going
to look at it again unless someone specifically asks me to.
Really? I'm surprised about that. I won't be able to resist it, I
suspect.
It’s an attention thing. There will be stuff screaming for my
attention and stuff that’s out there, but that I would have to search
for. The things that are on fire tend to win :-).
...
...
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.
No, not really; it's the same sort of discussion. In the past,
we've had some difficulty in keeping ex-members engaged after they
left Council, and there are probably a number of possible reasons
for that: 1) they left because they were tired of it and wanted a
break; 2) they stood for election but weren't elected, and were
understandably a bit upset by that and backed away; 3) without the
official title and role of Council member they couldn't justify the
time to their employer or institution. We can't do much about #1,
but with a slightly more formal system for recognizing and
encouraging continued involvement, as you suggest below, we can
mitigate #3 and possibly even #2 (people might voluntarily step
down knowing they could more easily stay involved anyway).
I’ve always found that aspect of the TEI weird. On most software-type
projects, there aren’t any barriers to contributing other than that
your contribution is deemed worthwhile, and if you contribute enough,
they give you your own set of keys. In the TEI, you (more or less)
can’t contribute unless you win a popularity contest. I think an
elected Council is a good thing in many ways, as it’s the whole
community who gets to decide who leads it, but it’s bad in that
potential contributors get locked out. I’d like to see some sort of
hybrid, where the leaders are elected, but the contributors can join
in and be recognized.
...
...
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".
I'm not vehemently against it, but I do agree that if I'm going to
my boss to ask for (say) fifteen hours of work time to spend on
some ant build scripts for the TEI, it would be a much easier
conversation if I can start by presenting some sort of document
that makes a formal request from the Consortium for my contribution
as an senior committer or an expert or something like that. Brownie
points and labels are always helpful. But at the same time, much of
what we do is along the lines of correcting a typo when we notice
it; a quick fork, fix, and pull request will make that slightly
easier for non-Council members, so perhaps we'll see more of that
too.
I think we’re in agreement that we need something along these lines.
I’d like it to be less exceptional than the "invited expert" thing.
...
...
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?
Absolutely. But I really don't think that will happen with regard
to P5.
We’ve got to develop P6 at some point too...
...
The Stylesheets are a whole bigger issue; that stuff is very
complicated, and hardly anyone but Sebastian has done serious work
on it. There are some signs that the move to git has encouraged
non-Council members to submit patches and pull requests, which is
encouraging, but there are aspects of the Stylesheets processing
that none of us (on Council or off) understand well enough. ODD
processing is arguably at the heart of everything, and is in
transition with the introduction of Pure ODD, but I'll wager none
of us feels that we have a solid understanding of it at the XSLT
level. That worries me far more than Guidelines editing. So much so
that it may be worth setting up a SIG to develop some expertise
there. Since the Stylesheets are outside the official remit of the
Council, that would not have to consist of Council members
exclusively.
Yeah, it worries me a good deal too. I’d very much like to do some
"decomplecting" work on our processes. We should be able to get any
Council member happily using them inside of a few weeks, and we’re
*not* there.
...
Cheers, Martin
...
...
On Aug 3, 2015, at 15:03 , Lou Burnard
 wrote:
It would be good to hear other people's views on this topic,
but I suspect everyone's on holiday from the interwebs.
Just for the record, my view is much closer to Martin's than
to Hugh's. I think introducing a whole new category of "council
member who is not quite a council member, but has a lot of the
same power as one"  -- in particular the power to dominate
discussion on the council list -- would be a distinctly
retrograde step. Council discussion remains open for reading,
so should I fail to be re-elected, or decide not to stand, I
can still watch what is going on, and I can still talk to
council members to provide views or guidance or whatever in a
private capacity. That seems correct. Members are elected to
take decisions and implement them. They also need to gain some
technical skills to do that effectively, and (so far at least)
have always succeeded in doing so. It would be a disaster to
wind up with a Council devoid of technical skills which relied
on some secret cadre of old farts to do their work for them!
On 03/08/15 19:23, Hugh Cayless wrote:
...
Those are all good objections. The core of my worry is this:
there are necessary functions performed by Council that only
a very few of us (and I don't think I'd include myself in
that number) can do. We have to maintain a core group who can
perform those functions one way or another. How do we do
that? And how do we get new people up to that level?
Especially since a single term in Council isn't long enough
to acquire the necessary experience...
On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 2:05 PM, Martin Holmes
 wrote:
...
Hi Hugh,
On 15-08-03 10:36 AM, Hugh Cayless wrote:
> I certainly wouldn't want it to be a House of Lords kind
> of thing...I think that would be terrible. I think the
> elected body should have full administrative control over
> our processes. But I do think non-Council contributors
> (should we decide such a category is useful) ought to be
> formally recognized for the services they perform.
>
I certainly agree with that. When Dan O'Donnell was chair
of the Board, he used to send out very nice letters of
recognition to Council and Board members every year; that
sort of thing can be very helpful when it comes to
mobilizing institutional support for your work and for the
TEI in general. A recognized "Committer" role with specific
duties and rights could be a good thing.
I'm also not sure why
> people ought to be automatically kicked off the Council
> List.
>
Because entrenched positions could remain entrenched even
after many of their supporters had been voted off Council
or had stood down. This would be so even if the old members
no longer had voting rights, because the discourse could be
dominated by their voices.
As for
> meetings, we rarely have a full complement of Council
> members at any meeting, so if committers could be invited
> to fill in, I don't see what harm it would do.
>
Let's imagine for the sake of argument that we have five
new women members of Council, four of whom have youngish
families, and are in contexts (cultural, social, familial
or whatever) that make absence from their families less
acceptable and more difficult for them to arrange than for
the male members and ex-members. Now imagine that there's a
Doodle poll going on where it becomes apparent that it's
going to be quite tricky to find dates for a face-to-face
meeting which suit everyone, and that the people with the
smallest windows of availability happen to be some of the
women. There's now a temptation for the Council to decide
that they will simply pick dates that don't suit everyone
and fill in the balance of missing members (mainly women)
with ex-members (mainly men). Whereas if this option is not
available, there's much stronger pressure for more
strenuous negotiation, for others to change their
preferences, and so on.
I also think committers would be subject to being booted
by Council if
> their presence was considered unhelpful.
>
There would need to be a detailed formal procedure for
this sort of thing, otherwise all sorts of unpleasantness
could arise.
One would hope that would never
> happen, but it could if someone was making a nuisance of
> themselves. The elected Council would be in charge of
> the process.
>
> Or am I nuts and worrying over nothing? You may have
> noticed I worry a lot about fragility in systems :-)
>
I do too. Mostly at the moment I worry about the fragility
of a system which is so heavily male-dominated that it
risks appearing antiquated and rather ridiculous, and
alienating half of the community out of which we hope its
inheritors and curators will emerge. Something good is
happening in this election, and I hope we don't take any
unusual measures in response to it that would appear to be
undermining it in any way.
Cheers, Martin
On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Martin Holmes
 wrote:
> Hi Hugh,
>> What you're proposing is analogous to an appointed
>> House of Lords, to supplement the existing House of
>> Commons which is the elected Council. There are
>> benefits to this, as you outline: continuity, retention
>> of skills, and all that; but there are also obvious
>> risks that are well exemplified by the political
>> analogues (in both the UK and Canada, recently).
>>
>> Let's consider the push for a better gender balance
>> (which I also very strongly support, and which is the
>> main reason I'm not standing again). If five Council
>> members are replaced by (say) five new members who are
>> women, then we would have a good gender balance; but if
>> the majority of the exiting males are then co-opted
>> back into the mix on the basis that the old guard wants
>> to keep them around, then we've instantly undermined
>> the new gender balance, and we would expect much of the
>> discourse to continue in exactly the same way as it has
>> up to now.
>>
>> So while I'm definitely in favour of encouraging
>> ex-members of Council to stay as involved as they want
>> to be (and personally, I want to stay very involved), I
>> think we should think twice about adding them to the
>> Council mailing list, and think especially hard about
>> expending precious resources to ship them to FtF
>> meetings (which are already hard enough to schedule
>> with ten members). Instead, I'd like to suggest that
>> retiring Council members be assigned a mentorship role
>> (should they want it, and should the mentoree want it)
>> with one of the new members. This would relieve the
>> continuing Council members, whose workload may be
>> rather higher in the first months of an influx of new
>> folks, from some of the training and mentoring work,
>> and would also mean that, since mentoring would take
>> place largely off the publicly-archived list, new
>> members might feel less nervous about asking what they
>> might fear are naive questions.
>>
>> Ex-members who remain as "committers" could also of
>> course have tickets assigned to them, and have commit
>> privileges to the repos should they want them; although
>> if we do move to git, perhaps one of the distinctions
>> between Council members and non-members might be that
>> only Council members can push to master on the TEI
>> repo, and the rest of us have to submit pull requests.
>>
>> Cheers, Martin
>>
>>
>> On 15-08-03 09:54 AM, Hugh Cayless wrote:
>>
>> As I hinted a couple of emails ago, I'd like to think
>> about new models
>>> for how Council might work, with the following things
>>> in mind:
>>>
>>> 1. There is a push underway to improve the gender
>>> balance of the Council membership, which I'm fully in
>>> favor of, but which means we have a largish list of
>>> nominees and therefore the potential for a largish
>>> influx of new members in January, and possibly again
>>> the following year. My sense is that we could still
>>> be better at on-boarding new members.
>>>
>>> 2. I feel like having Council be purely an elected
>>> body carries with it both risks and rewards. The
>>> reward is clearly the periodic influx of new ideas
>>> and perspectives. The risk is that we lose expertise
>>> and continuity when Council members rotate off—and
>>> sometimes they rotate off for reasons like they
>>> forgot to submit a statement, or didn't read their
>>> email. We don't do a very good job of continuing to
>>> involve interested contributors after they've left.
>>> We say that new members don't have to be
>>> super-technical, and that's true, but there *are*
>>> wizard-level technical and conceptual components to
>>> the TEI and we need to have people who can manage
>>> them. As an aside, I'd like to see a push for making
>>> it *much* easier to do things like build the
>>> Guidelines, but I think we have enough on our plate
>>> at the moment.
>>>
>>> So what could we do to mitigate the risks and amplify
>>> the rewards?
>>>
>>> I've mentioned in the past that I'd like to see,
>>> besides the elected body of Council members, a group
>>> of committers who serve in much the same way as
>>> Council members but are there because they've been
>>> appointed and are willing to contribute. Committers
>>> might be subscribed to the Council mailing list,
>>> participate (as available) on teleconferences, and
>>> come to F2F meetings (perhaps subject to budgeting).
>>> They would be identified as Committers by the
>>> TEI—i.e. they would be listed on the website and
>>> could put it on their CVs. There's some precedent for
>>> this, of course: we've drafted Lou in the past when
>>> he wasn't technically on Council. My point is that,
>>> while former Council members don't lose their commit
>>> privileges now, they do get removed from the Council
>>> list, and are not included in meetings anymore, nor
>>> are they recognized in any way, so they lose the
>>> incentive to continue to contribute, with the result
>>> that they stop. That's not to say that people can't
>>> just serve their time on Council and then move on to
>>> other things, but that valuable, interested
>>> contributors should have a means to continue their
>>> work and should be recognized for doing so.
>>>
>>> Does this sound in any way sensible? What should be
>>> the benefits of being a Committer? How would they be
>>> appointed? What role(s) would they play? Should they
>>> be former Council members, or could we draft anyone
>>> (provided they have the ability and desire to
>>> contribute of course)?
>>>
>>> What do you all think? Obviously this would involve
>>> some rule changes and I assume we'd have to involve
>>> the Board, etc...
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>> tei-council mailing list tei-council@lists.tei-c.org
>> http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council
>>
>>
>>
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