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 :-).