Re: [tei-council] Council's Future

3 Aug 2015

      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? :-)

Personally, once off the Council list, I’m probably never going to look at it again unless someone specifically asks me to. 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.

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".

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?
...
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...
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