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'm also not sure why
people ought to be automatically kicked off the Council List. 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.
I also think committers would be subject to being booted by Council if
their presence was considered unhelpful. 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 :-)
On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Martin Holmes
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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