Re: [tei-council] Contributors

Hi all, I can see benefits and drawbacks on both sides, but generally agree with Lou's point of view below. I think only Council (and ppl like webmaster) should be on the council list since it is an open but elected body. I like Magdalena's idea of not necessarily distinguishing between Council and other Trusted Developers on github, but if both have the same github privileges, then it doesn't really bother me if there such a distinction. I am actively against the idea of a TEI-tech mailing list (it has been suggested before and as Lou notes wasn't successful). I learned my TEI mostly from 1999-2003 by eavesdropping on the TEI-L mailing list and asking people lots of stupid questions. I learned it even more when I started trying to answer questions. I'm sure I still have a lot more to learn. The technical conversations there are easily ignored by users who are not interested and raise the technical literacy of the community for those who do eavesdrop. (And by technical literacy here I mean specifically of the TEI infrastructure.) Indeed, I'd encourage Council to have _more_ technical discussions on TEI-L when we're discussing a particular ticket/issue so as to involve the wider community more regularly. I.e. the council list should be for council business (which includes making the decisions) but general discussion of issues that are potentially of interest to a wider audience we could include more people. I also agree that Lou shouldn't be given any special title or status when he departs council. ;-) He knows he already has that in our hearts. -James On 04/12/15 10:16, Lou Burnard wrote:

I don't think anyone's arguing against widening access to the Council's deliberations. However, I do think that an important, possibly the most important,. thing the Council does (eventually) is MAKE DECISIONS. In that sense it is not just a general discussion forum: it is also an executive. Which is why I would vote against blurring the distinction between the Council and the body of people supervising, criticising, or even contributing to those decisions. If having lots of people in a telco makes it inefficient, so does having lots of people contributing to a mailing list (possibly even more so, since it's all too easy for email discussion to go off on a tangent). So while I am all in favour of making it as easy as possible for Council discussion to be read by as many people as possible, I think that contributions to it should come via our usual open route, i.e. TEI-L. As Paul notes (and I agree) there is no need to set up a separate "techie only" discussion list (and when we did it was a resounding failure, fwiw)

As to the role of ancient monuments like myself: when I come off Council, I fully intend to continue to scrutinize Council discussions and if so moved comment on them on TEI-L. I also expect to be continuing to tinker with ideas for improving the TEI Guidelines, which I will feed into the Council's deliberations. But I do not expect or desire to be given any special title or status as a result.

On 04/12/15 10:02, Magdalena Turska wrote:

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Hi,

As I see it, council list is publicly archived anyway, I don't expect allowing other people to join should raise any issues - anyone who's interested in reading can do it anyway, but list subscription would make it a lot easier to follow the discussion. The only 'danger' would be sudden high volume of traffic from outside of Council, but let's be realistic how likely is that. So I'd be all for opening the council list for anyone. Keeping separate contributors list is a great idea if you want to have one more dead list with 0 traffic on your mailserver :)

For telcos I do support the view that too much people makes them very inefficient, so unless there's a specific reason to invite someone, no point in doing that. For f2f though, especially if they happen to coincide with a conference some of you did say already that the open Council session in Lyon was a good experiment, so why not repeat it (with some disclaimer how many ppl max council can accommodate?).

As for pushing privileges or organization membership, I expect that once one someone gets it, there's no real need to revoke them just because someone's term on the Council has come to an end? To avoid misunderstanding we might skip the 'Council' tag altogether. As a side not for the repos, is there a policy already like 'let's only work via pull requests' or 'don't ever merge your own changes', to keep some level of peer review there?

All in all, the goal from my perspective is to keep as many ppl involved in active development and infrastructure maintenance as possible. Which is obviously hard as we all are busy with our dayjobs. So we shouldn't impose formal barriers for those rare specimens who might fancy devoting their private time to TEI.

Best,

Magdalena

On 4 December 2015 at 02:06, Paul Schaffner wrote:

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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:

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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:

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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 :-).

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