Re: [tei-council] Council's Future

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:

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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!

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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 :-).

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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.

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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.

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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

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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:

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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:

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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, > 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 > > PLEASE NOTE: postings to this list are publicly archived > -- tei-council mailing list tei-council@lists.tei-c.org http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council

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