Re: [tei-council] Council's Future

Hi Hugh, On 15-08-03 11:23 AM, 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.

There's certainly nothing you couldn't grok in a couple of hours, to be honest. Some of it remains a bit arcane and under-documented, and I don't think there's anyone (except Sebastian) who fully understands all of it, but we've been steadily moving down the road of documenting and clarifying it all with some success over the last few years. Releases have been carried out frequently by new members of Council based on our documentation. Moving forward, I'd like to see more of our processes moved from bash scripts to ant, so that they would run on Windows; I have some learning to do in that area, but I'll have to do that for the oxygen-tei build at the request of the Syncro folks, and I can bring that knowledge back to the main repo build process. All our processes are likely to require Java, that's certain (because of Saxon, Trang, Jing etc.); if we could remove other dependencies (or make them branch-by-OS, so bash on *NIX and cmd on Windows) we'd be in a better place.

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...

We've taken a rather haphazard approach to training and mentoring up to now, so I do take your point; but I think if we took the time to engage with new members and discover what they're most interested in and suited for, and especially try to identify those who are able and willing to acquire the gnarlier skills early on, we could bring those people up to speed more quickly than we have before. Also, if we make the role of committer more formally recognized than before, and strongly encourage continued engagement by ex-members, even someone transitioning off Council after only two years would keep developing their skills. I wish it weren't the case that three major shifts (Council membership changes, SF to GitHub, and PureODD) weren't happening simultaneously, but the first two are unavoidable, and the last too advanced to put on hold at this stage. We're not under any pressure to release anything by any specific date, though. Cheers, Martin

On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 2:05 PM, Martin Holmes wrote:

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Hi Hugh,

On 15-08-03 10:36 AM, Hugh Cayless wrote:

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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:

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Hi Hugh,

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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

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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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