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 wrote:

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

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 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 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 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 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:

...

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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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:

...

Hi Hugh,

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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:

...

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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Hmmm ... without putting too much thought into it, my feelings are squarely with Hugh in worrying about it, and squarely with Martin in not doing anything (more) about it. That is, all the pieces needed are already present: * Council can invite a particular individual to the e-mail list or to a specific discussion at will; * Council can invite particular individuals to be committers to the SVN (or GIT) repository at will; * Council can request permission from the Board to have a particular individual present at a face-to-face meeting -- unless we were already over-budget, it's hard to imagine the Board saying no; * Having assigned these privileges, Council could revoke them (although it might be a politically charged move) at will. All that said, it might be nice to have a title for such individuals. I believe we called Lou an "invited expert". If and when we find the people we're inviting to help out are turning us down, we can think about titles and rewards (like waved membership fee). Personally, I don't think that's going to happen for a long time, if at all.

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? :-) Personally, once off the Council list, I’m probably never going to look at it again unless someone specifically asks me to. 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. 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". 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?

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:

...

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:

...

Hi Hugh,

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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:

...

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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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:

...

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!

...

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 :-).

...

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.

...

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.

...

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

...

...

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:

...

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:

...

Hi Hugh,

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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:

...

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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On 03/08/15 21:15, Hugh Cayless wrote:

I Presumably then, you’re against being an invited expert again should you not be re-elected? :-)

Well, I am not against it in the sense of thinking it would be wrong to be asked; whether I would accept the request would depend on all sorts of other factors.

Personally, once off the Council list, I’m probably never going to look at it again unless someone specifically asks me to.

That's obviously a matter of personal choice. However, as Martin remarks, there are several existence proofs both for ex-Council members who never re-appear, and for several who do (e.g. Piotr, Laurent...)

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.

I am not sure what you mean by "in secret". The Council's list and its repositories are all open and public.

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".

This situation comes with the territory though: we are an open source project. I rather suspect that letters from the TEI don't cut much ice with most employers when it comes to justifying use of time : if your boss has heard of and approves of the TEI, that's likely to count for a lot more (and fortunately this seems to be increasingly likely). But what do I know.

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?

Yes. One can imagine many disastrous scenarios. The point is though that a Council which is incapable of understanding the technical architecture of the TEI is not doing its job.

James makes three good suggestions and one not so good. 1) Mentoring is good and we already do it; the proposal is to enlarge the group of mentors to include non-currently-Council members. This is fine so long as the NCCM remains au fait with current Council practice. Less so if the latter has changed. You (presumably) don't want old farts saying "I dunno about this new fangled git nonsense". 2) Committers dont have to be on council (nor even formally council approved?). I think we already do this, don't we? 3) Advisory Group. This is the one I find not so good. It sounds partly like adding another layer of bureaucracy to the TEI organigramme, partly like reinventing the long gone "TEI-TECH" mailing list. If you want to consult the TEI community, consult TEI-L. End of (as you young people say). 4) Get the sorcerer's apprentice to write the handbook. Enthusiastically endorsed... and we already do it, don't we? On 04/08/15 11:46, James Cummings wrote:

Hi all,

I've been waiting to see where this discussion would go before commenting, and I think we are in danger of derailing some good ideas whilst accidentally combining some others.

Some of our worries concern: - the improving of getting new members (of whatever gender or technical background) up to speed not only with the basics but some of the more arcane mysteries of TEI Infrastructure and work - encouraging continued participation by those who were once TEI Council Members in all sorts of activities, but also technically competent people (whether ever on Council or not) as contributors to various technical aspects of Council activities - avoiding secret cadre of old farts (which I would abbreviate 'SCOFF', and leave it to you to figure out what the extra 'f' is for), or the sense that there is some division in the TEI of a high priesthood telling people what is good for them, whilst simultaneously recognising there are some arcane wizardly matters both technical and conceptual which do take a significant commitment to agree upon.

Having thought about it for awhile I am strongly against the idea of adding lots of additional people in any way to the tei-council list. I think that Council needs a place to discuss things as elected representatives without lots of chipping in from the public. If someone shouts down from the public gallery in the House of Commons, then they will be ejected. It is fine for them to sit and listen to politicians being morons, just as the TEI Community can read the tei-council mailing list. Indeed, I was one of those who argued that this list should be made public.[1] However, when they disagree with what we say, they don't have an equal voice -- but they can speak via representatives should they convince them of their point of view. However, I do agree the concerns above are real. I would propose the following suggestions which might help us overcome some of these concerns.

1) Mentors: Any new member (or indeed existing member who feels they wish it) can be provided one or more mentor(s) either on or off the Council who will agree to answer (to the best of their ability) questions put to them. If they ask me questions I will ask if I can answer them as blog posts in order to make the answer public and add to the disparate network of TEI documentation out there. Mentors must agree, of course, and be willing to do this. I am. This should be arranged separately from Council business by the chair of the council, but should be noted in the minutes.

2) Committers: Anyone previously elected to Council, or who desires it and is approved by Council (via apathetic assumption voting) can be added as a committer on any version control repository of any form that the Council is using for the development of software or guidelines if they so desire. If the person's interests only concern one aspect (e.g. Stylesheets) then we should give them rights to just that repository.

3) Advisory Group: The loss of experienced TEI old farts as they go off and get involved in other things is understandable and a waste of talent. We should set up an additional mailing list (which maybe is entirely open for anyone to join? But definitely open to read), and encourage ex-Council and others who wish to join to do so. This mailing list would be a TEI Advisors or some sort of advisory board, or whatnot. The benefit of this is that it gives Council (and presumably Board) a place to turn to in order to 'Ask the TEI Community' when they want distinct suggestions rather than approaching TEI-L as a whole. i.e. a subset of the TEI Community that is the most active and involved people from over the years. This should not just be those with Technical knowledge, but we should feel free to ask them quite technical questions. I would much prefer this than being co-opted back on to Council if I am not re-elected. (Unlike MartinH I've decided to stand again to help in what I feel will be a term where the Council transitions to new ways of working.)

4) Documentation: Get a commitment from some new members to actively produce documentation on some of the more obscure technical aspects of the TEI Infrastructure (as they learn them) for review and improvement by Council as working documents. I.e. Get them to write some of the policies and documentation for the systems we use as they learn about them, while asking Council for support and advice. This forces a very concrete way of learning some of the systems. We need to get to a point where if (over two generations) all quite technical people had left the Council that incoming ones could get back up to speed by reading the documentation we had left and experimenting with the infrastructure.

While these four suggestions won't necessarily solve all the concerns we might have, I do think if enacted they'd be an improvement.

-James

[1] http://lists.village.virginia.edu/pipermail/tei-council/2006/005757.html

On 04/08/15 08:36, Lou Burnard wrote:

...

On 03/08/15 21:15, Hugh Cayless wrote:

...

I Presumably then, you’re against being an invited expert again should you not be re-elected? :-)

Well, I am not against it in the sense of thinking it would be wrong to be asked; whether I would accept the request would depend on all sorts of other factors.

...

Personally, once off the Council list, I’m probably never going to look at it again unless someone specifically asks me to.

That's obviously a matter of personal choice. However, as Martin remarks, there are several existence proofs both for ex-Council members who never re-appear, and for several who do (e.g. Piotr, Laurent...)

...

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.

I am not sure what you mean by "in secret". The Council's list and its repositories are all open and public.

...

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".

This situation comes with the territory though: we are an open source project. I rather suspect that letters from the TEI don't cut much ice with most employers when it comes to justifying use of time : if your boss has heard of and approves of the TEI, that's likely to count for a lot more (and fortunately this seems to be increasingly likely). But what do I know.

...

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?

Yes. One can imagine many disastrous scenarios. The point is though that a Council which is incapable of understanding the technical architecture of the TEI is not doing its job.

Thanks James, this is very helpful. Breaking my silence briefly...

On Aug 4, 2015, at 6:46 , James Cummings wrote:

Hi all,

I've been waiting to see where this discussion would go before commenting, and I think we are in danger of derailing some good ideas whilst accidentally combining some others.

Some of our worries concern: - the improving of getting new members (of whatever gender or technical background) up to speed not only with the basics but some of the more arcane mysteries of TEI Infrastructure and work - encouraging continued participation by those who were once TEI Council Members in all sorts of activities, but also technically competent people (whether ever on Council or not) as contributors to various technical aspects of Council activities - avoiding secret cadre of old farts (which I would abbreviate 'SCOFF', and leave it to you to figure out what the extra 'f' is for), or the sense that there is some division in the TEI of a high priesthood telling people what is good for them, whilst simultaneously recognising there are some arcane wizardly matters both technical and conceptual which do take a significant commitment to agree upon.

This is a good summary. I have a bit of a problem with the third point in that a) experience is something to be cherished rather than denigrated, and b) we kind of already have this situation. My own preference would be to engage the experienced people and (as much as possible) demystify the arcane matters.

Having thought about it for awhile I am strongly against the idea of adding lots of additional people in any way to the tei-council list. I think that Council needs a place to discuss things as elected representatives without lots of chipping in from the public. If someone shouts down from the public gallery in the House of Commons, then they will be ejected. It is fine for them to sit and listen to politicians being morons, just as the TEI Community can read the tei-council mailing list. Indeed, I was one of those who argued that this list should be made public.[1] However, when they disagree with what we say, they don't have an equal voice -- but they can speak via representatives should they convince them of their point of view. However, I do agree the concerns above are real. I would propose the following suggestions which might help us overcome some of these concerns.

1) Mentors: Any new member (or indeed existing member who feels they wish it) can be provided one or more mentor(s) either on or off the Council who will agree to answer (to the best of their ability) questions put to them. If they ask me questions I will ask if I can answer them as blog posts in order to make the answer public and add to the disparate network of TEI documentation out there. Mentors must agree, of course, and be willing to do this. I am. This should be arranged separately from Council business by the chair of the council, but should be noted in the minutes.

+1 expanding and improving the mentoring program can only be good.

2) Committers: Anyone previously elected to Council, or who desires it and is approved by Council (via apathetic assumption voting) can be added as a committer on any version control repository of any form that the Council is using for the development of software or guidelines if they so desire. If the person's interests only concern one aspect (e.g. Stylesheets) then we should give them rights to just that repository.

Agreed

3) Advisory Group: The loss of experienced TEI old farts as they go off and get involved in other things is understandable and a waste of talent. We should set up an additional mailing list (which maybe is entirely open for anyone to join? But definitely open to read), and encourage ex-Council and others who wish to join to do so. This mailing list would be a TEI Advisors or some sort of advisory board, or whatnot. The benefit of this is that it gives Council (and presumably Board) a place to turn to in order to 'Ask the TEI Community' when they want distinct suggestions rather than approaching TEI-L as a whole. i.e. a subset of the TEI Community that is the most active and involved people from over the years. This should not just be those with Technical knowledge, but we should feel free to ask them quite technical questions. I would much prefer this than being co-opted back on to Council if I am not re-elected. (Unlike MartinH I've decided to stand again to help in what I feel will be a term where the Council transitions to new ways of working.)

An open "TEI-dev" list might work if we agreed to do most of our non-administrative Council work on it, and encouraged people to join in. Lou may be right though that we should just move more technical business to TEI-L, which is where everyone is already. It’s a good thing that the Council list is open, but speaking only for myself, anything that I have to go look for and can’t directly contribute to just isn’t going to get to the level of my conscious attention very often. It might as well be private. Maybe I’m strange :-).

4) Documentation: Get a commitment from some new members to actively produce documentation on some of the more obscure technical aspects of the TEI Infrastructure (as they learn them) for review and improvement by Council as working documents. I.e. Get them to write some of the policies and documentation for the systems we use as they learn about them, while asking Council for support and advice. This forces a very concrete way of learning some of the systems. We need to get to a point where if (over two generations) all quite technical people had left the Council that incoming ones could get back up to speed by reading the documentation we had left and experimenting with the infrastructure.

Documentation is a definite problem for us. Ease of use is another. One nice advantage of GitHub is that we can put a big, friendly README.md front and center on our repos that tells people how to get started. I think that’s one of the first things we should do. But there are also things like "How do I customize an ODD and build a schema from it?" which cry out for tutorials and improved processes. After 2.5 years on Council, I still can’t run a full build of the Guidelines on my computer. That kind of sucks.

While these four suggestions won't necessarily solve all the concerns we might have, I do think if enacted they'd be an improvement.

These are all great, James. Thanks!

-James

[1] http://lists.village.virginia.edu/pipermail/tei-council/2006/005757.html

On 04/08/15 08:36, Lou Burnard wrote:

...

On 03/08/15 21:15, Hugh Cayless wrote:

...

I Presumably then, you’re against being an invited expert again should you not be re-elected? :-)

Well, I am not against it in the sense of thinking it would be wrong to be asked; whether I would accept the request would depend on all sorts of other factors.

...

Personally, once off the Council list, I’m probably never going to look at it again unless someone specifically asks me to.

That's obviously a matter of personal choice. However, as Martin remarks, there are several existence proofs both for ex-Council members who never re-appear, and for several who do (e.g. Piotr, Laurent...)

...

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.

I am not sure what you mean by "in secret". The Council's list and its repositories are all open and public.

...

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".

This situation comes with the territory though: we are an open source project. I rather suspect that letters from the TEI don't cut much ice with most employers when it comes to justifying use of time : if your boss has heard of and approves of the TEI, that's likely to count for a lot more (and fortunately this seems to be increasingly likely). But what do I know.

...

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?

Yes. One can imagine many disastrous scenarios. The point is though that a Council which is incapable of understanding the technical architecture of the TEI is not doing its job.

-- Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.uk Academic IT Services, University of Oxford

-- 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

Wouldn't that naturally fall to the chair of the council? -James On 04/08/15 16:07, Martin Holmes wrote:

Perhaps a good first step for keeping emeritus members involved would be for one member of Council to be assigned the role of emeritus shepherd; that person would stay in touch with still-active committers, and keep current with their skillsets so that he or she could suggest that a ticket be assigned to an emeritus member if it's a good fit for them.

Cheers, Martin

On 15-08-04 06:30 AM, Hugh Cayless wrote:

...

Thanks James, this is very helpful. Breaking my silence briefly...

...

On Aug 4, 2015, at 6:46 , James Cummings wrote:

Hi all,

I've been waiting to see where this discussion would go before commenting, and I think we are in danger of derailing some good ideas whilst accidentally combining some others.

Some of our worries concern: - the improving of getting new members (of whatever gender or technical background) up to speed not only with the basics but some of the more arcane mysteries of TEI Infrastructure and work - encouraging continued participation by those who were once TEI Council Members in all sorts of activities, but also technically competent people (whether ever on Council or not) as contributors to various technical aspects of Council activities - avoiding secret cadre of old farts (which I would abbreviate 'SCOFF', and leave it to you to figure out what the extra 'f' is for), or the sense that there is some division in the TEI of a high priesthood telling people what is good for them, whilst simultaneously recognising there are some arcane wizardly matters both technical and conceptual which do take a significant commitment to agree upon.

This is a good summary. I have a bit of a problem with the third point in that a) experience is something to be cherished rather than denigrated, and b) we kind of already have this situation. My own preference would be to engage the experienced people and (as much as possible) demystify the arcane matters.

...

Having thought about it for awhile I am strongly against the idea of adding lots of additional people in any way to the tei-council list. I think that Council needs a place to discuss things as elected representatives without lots of chipping in from the public. If someone shouts down from the public gallery in the House of Commons, then they will be ejected. It is fine for them to sit and listen to politicians being morons, just as the TEI Community can read the tei-council mailing list. Indeed, I was one of those who argued that this list should be made public.[1] However, when they disagree with what we say, they don't have an equal voice -- but they can speak via representatives should they convince them of their point of view. However, I do agree the concerns above are real. I would propose the following suggestions which might help us overcome some of these concerns.

1) Mentors: Any new member (or indeed existing member who feels they wish it) can be provided one or more mentor(s) either on or off the Council who will agree to answer (to the best of their ability) questions put to them. If they ask me questions I will ask if I can answer them as blog posts in order to make the answer public and add to the disparate network of TEI documentation out there. Mentors must agree, of course, and be willing to do this. I am. This should be arranged separately from Council business by the chair of the council, but should be noted in the minutes.

+1 expanding and improving the mentoring program can only be good.

...

2) Committers: Anyone previously elected to Council, or who desires it and is approved by Council (via apathetic assumption voting) can be added as a committer on any version control repository of any form that the Council is using for the development of software or guidelines if they so desire. If the person's interests only concern one aspect (e.g. Stylesheets) then we should give them rights to just that repository.

Agreed

...

3) Advisory Group: The loss of experienced TEI old farts as they go off and get involved in other things is understandable and a waste of talent. We should set up an additional mailing list (which maybe is entirely open for anyone to join? But definitely open to read), and encourage ex-Council and others who wish to join to do so. This mailing list would be a TEI Advisors or some sort of advisory board, or whatnot. The benefit of this is that it gives Council (and presumably Board) a place to turn to in order to 'Ask the TEI Community' when they want distinct suggestions rather than approaching TEI-L as a whole. i.e. a subset of the TEI Community that is the most active and involved people from over the years. This should not just be those with Technical knowledge, but we should feel free to ask them quite technical questions. I would much prefer this than being co-opted back on to Council if I am not re-elected. (Unlike MartinH I've decided to stand again to help in what I feel will be a term where the Council transitions to new ways of working.)

An open "TEI-dev" list might work if we agreed to do most of our non-administrative Council work on it, and encouraged people to join in. Lou may be right though that we should just move more technical business to TEI-L, which is where everyone is already. It’s a good thing that the Council list is open, but speaking only for myself, anything that I have to go look for and can’t directly contribute to just isn’t going to get to the level of my conscious attention very often. It might as well be private. Maybe I’m strange :-).

...

4) Documentation: Get a commitment from some new members to actively produce documentation on some of the more obscure technical aspects of the TEI Infrastructure (as they learn them) for review and improvement by Council as working documents. I.e. Get them to write some of the policies and documentation for the systems we use as they learn about them, while asking Council for support and advice. This forces a very concrete way of learning some of the systems. We need to get to a point where if (over two generations) all quite technical people had left the Council that incoming ones could get back up to speed by reading the documentation we had left and experimenting with the infrastructure.

Documentation is a definite problem for us. Ease of use is another. One nice advantage of GitHub is that we can put a big, friendly README.md front and center on our repos that tells people how to get started. I think that’s one of the first things we should do. But there are also things like "How do I customize an ODD and build a schema from it?" which cry out for tutorials and improved processes. After 2.5 years on Council, I still can’t run a full build of the Guidelines on my computer. That kind of sucks.

...

While these four suggestions won't necessarily solve all the concerns we might have, I do think if enacted they'd be an improvement.

These are all great, James. Thanks!

...

-James

[1] http://lists.village.virginia.edu/pipermail/tei-council/2006/005757.html

On 04/08/15 08:36, Lou Burnard wrote:

...

...

On 03/08/15 21:15, Hugh Cayless wrote:

...

I Presumably then, you’re against being an invited expert again should you not be re-elected? :-)

Well, I am not against it in the sense of thinking it would be wrong to be asked; whether I would accept the request would depend on all sorts of other factors.

...

Personally, once off the Council list, I’m probably never going to look at it again unless someone specifically asks me to.

That's obviously a matter of personal choice. However, as Martin remarks, there are several existence proofs both for ex-Council members who never re-appear, and for several who do (e.g. Piotr, Laurent...)

...

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.

I am not sure what you mean by "in secret". The Council's list and its repositories are all open and public.

...

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".

This situation comes with the territory though: we are an open source project. I rather suspect that letters from the TEI don't cut much ice with most employers when it comes to justifying use of time : if your boss has heard of and approves of the TEI, that's likely to count for a lot more (and fortunately this seems to be increasingly likely). But what do I know.

...

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?

Yes. One can imagine many disastrous scenarios. The point is though that a Council which is incapable of understanding the technical architecture of the TEI is not doing its job.

-- Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.uk Academic IT Services, University of Oxford

-- 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

-- Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.uk Academic IT Services, University of Oxford

I think we do not need to worry so much about emeritus members. Especially the move to GitHub will make it much easier for them (and others!) to contribute to the development of the Guidelines. (I remember Sebastian saying that the move to GitHub with the *Stylesheets* made people contributing we’ve not seen before.) I’m more concerned with the political issue of gender balance. That’s an issue with most software projects and most of the DH community[1]. I do not know how to solve this, but projects that come to mind are e.g. „Rails girls“[2]. Maybe we should offer special TEI training sessions to women by female(?) tutors? Concerning Martin’s decision to not stand again for Council: While I do admire this step I do not think it will significantly raise the chances for a woman to be elected. Looking at the "Elections information“ from the last elections [3], there’s a huge bias towards male candidates. Hence, if there’s a real political will to change this, we’d need a quota. Yet, I’ve always seen the Council as a technical work group, not a political body. But it’s true we can and must do more for the dissemination of the required skills — but I’m not really sure how to achieve this?! Best Peter [1] http://www.scottbot.net/HIAL/?p=41375 [2] http://railsgirls.com [3] http://www.tei-c.org/Membership/Meetings/

Am 04.08.2015 um 17:07 schrieb Martin Holmes :

Perhaps a good first step for keeping emeritus members involved would be for one member of Council to be assigned the role of emeritus shepherd; that person would stay in touch with still-active committers, and keep current with their skillsets so that he or she could suggest that a ticket be assigned to an emeritus member if it's a good fit for them.

Cheers, Martin

On 15-08-04 06:30 AM, Hugh Cayless wrote:

...

Thanks James, this is very helpful. Breaking my silence briefly...

...

On Aug 4, 2015, at 6:46 , James Cummings wrote:

Hi all,

I've been waiting to see where this discussion would go before commenting, and I think we are in danger of derailing some good ideas whilst accidentally combining some others.

Some of our worries concern: - the improving of getting new members (of whatever gender or technical background) up to speed not only with the basics but some of the more arcane mysteries of TEI Infrastructure and work - encouraging continued participation by those who were once TEI Council Members in all sorts of activities, but also technically competent people (whether ever on Council or not) as contributors to various technical aspects of Council activities - avoiding secret cadre of old farts (which I would abbreviate 'SCOFF', and leave it to you to figure out what the extra 'f' is for), or the sense that there is some division in the TEI of a high priesthood telling people what is good for them, whilst simultaneously recognising there are some arcane wizardly matters both technical and conceptual which do take a significant commitment to agree upon.

This is a good summary. I have a bit of a problem with the third point in that a) experience is something to be cherished rather than denigrated, and b) we kind of already have this situation. My own preference would be to engage the experienced people and (as much as possible) demystify the arcane matters.

...

Having thought about it for awhile I am strongly against the idea of adding lots of additional people in any way to the tei-council list. I think that Council needs a place to discuss things as elected representatives without lots of chipping in from the public. If someone shouts down from the public gallery in the House of Commons, then they will be ejected. It is fine for them to sit and listen to politicians being morons, just as the TEI Community can read the tei-council mailing list. Indeed, I was one of those who argued that this list should be made public.[1] However, when they disagree with what we say, they don't have an equal voice -- but they can speak via representatives should they convince them of their point of view. However, I do agree the concerns above are real. I would propose the following suggestions which might help us overcome some of these concerns.

1) Mentors: Any new member (or indeed existing member who feels they wish it) can be provided one or more mentor(s) either on or off the Council who will agree to answer (to the best of their ability) questions put to them. If they ask me questions I will ask if I can answer them as blog posts in order to make the answer public and add to the disparate network of TEI documentation out there. Mentors must agree, of course, and be willing to do this. I am. This should be arranged separately from Council business by the chair of the council, but should be noted in the minutes.

+1 expanding and improving the mentoring program can only be good.

...

2) Committers: Anyone previously elected to Council, or who desires it and is approved by Council (via apathetic assumption voting) can be added as a committer on any version control repository of any form that the Council is using for the development of software or guidelines if they so desire. If the person's interests only concern one aspect (e.g. Stylesheets) then we should give them rights to just that repository.

Agreed

...

3) Advisory Group: The loss of experienced TEI old farts as they go off and get involved in other things is understandable and a waste of talent. We should set up an additional mailing list (which maybe is entirely open for anyone to join? But definitely open to read), and encourage ex-Council and others who wish to join to do so. This mailing list would be a TEI Advisors or some sort of advisory board, or whatnot. The benefit of this is that it gives Council (and presumably Board) a place to turn to in order to 'Ask the TEI Community' when they want distinct suggestions rather than approaching TEI-L as a whole. i.e. a subset of the TEI Community that is the most active and involved people from over the years. This should not just be those with Technical knowledge, but we should feel free to ask them quite technical questions. I would much prefer this than being co-opted back on to Council if I am not re-elected. (Unlike MartinH I've decided to stand again to help in what I feel will be a term where the Council transitions to new ways of working.)

An open "TEI-dev" list might work if we agreed to do most of our non-administrative Council work on it, and encouraged people to join in. Lou may be right though that we should just move more technical business to TEI-L, which is where everyone is already. It’s a good thing that the Council list is open, but speaking only for myself, anything that I have to go look for and can’t directly contribute to just isn’t going to get to the level of my conscious attention very often. It might as well be private. Maybe I’m strange :-).

...

4) Documentation: Get a commitment from some new members to actively produce documentation on some of the more obscure technical aspects of the TEI Infrastructure (as they learn them) for review and improvement by Council as working documents. I.e. Get them to write some of the policies and documentation for the systems we use as they learn about them, while asking Council for support and advice. This forces a very concrete way of learning some of the systems. We need to get to a point where if (over two generations) all quite technical people had left the Council that incoming ones could get back up to speed by reading the documentation we had left and experimenting with the infrastructure.

Documentation is a definite problem for us. Ease of use is another. One nice advantage of GitHub is that we can put a big, friendly README.md front and center on our repos that tells people how to get started. I think that’s one of the first things we should do. But there are also things like "How do I customize an ODD and build a schema from it?" which cry out for tutorials and improved processes. After 2.5 years on Council, I still can’t run a full build of the Guidelines on my computer. That kind of sucks.

...

While these four suggestions won't necessarily solve all the concerns we might have, I do think if enacted they'd be an improvement.

These are all great, James. Thanks!

...

-James

[1] http://lists.village.virginia.edu/pipermail/tei-council/2006/005757.html

On 04/08/15 08:36, Lou Burnard wrote:

...

...

On 03/08/15 21:15, Hugh Cayless wrote:

...

I Presumably then, you’re against being an invited expert again should you not be re-elected? :-)

Well, I am not against it in the sense of thinking it would be wrong to be asked; whether I would accept the request would depend on all sorts of other factors.

...

Personally, once off the Council list, I’m probably never going to look at it again unless someone specifically asks me to.

That's obviously a matter of personal choice. However, as Martin remarks, there are several existence proofs both for ex-Council members who never re-appear, and for several who do (e.g. Piotr, Laurent...)

...

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.

I am not sure what you mean by "in secret". The Council's list and its repositories are all open and public.

...

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".

This situation comes with the territory though: we are an open source project. I rather suspect that letters from the TEI don't cut much ice with most employers when it comes to justifying use of time : if your boss has heard of and approves of the TEI, that's likely to count for a lot more (and fortunately this seems to be increasingly likely). But what do I know.

...

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?

Yes. One can imagine many disastrous scenarios. The point is though that a Council which is incapable of understanding the technical architecture of the TEI is not doing its job.

-- Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.uk Academic IT Services, University of Oxford

-- 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

PLEASE NOTE: postings to this list are publicly archived

On 06/08/15 15:39, Peter Stadler wrote:

I’m more concerned with the political issue of gender balance. That’s an issue with most software projects and most of the DH community[1].

I do not know how to solve this, but projects that come to mind are e.g. „Rails girls“[2]. As a form of outreach that is good. For my own part, in addition to standing again myself to help with such mentoring if the community wishes, I've (openly to them) nominated a total of 14 women for board or council. I know that *some* of them have accepted and so we should have a nice healthy slate. (I hope this isn't counter-productive in dividing the vote somehow.) I should stress, however, lest there be any misunderstanding: I have not nominated these people because they happen to be women, I've nominated people who I believe have technical or other skills

Maybe we should offer special TEI training sessions to women by female(?) tutors? There have been many training sessions by excellent tutors who happen to be female -- it seems strange to me to somehow limit

Since this is a public list, I'd like to defend certain segments of the DH community here. Some try really quite hard to work on gender (and other) balances wherever feasible. With my DHOxSS hat on I'd point out that we provide a safe space for training, regardless of gender, but have a turn out of about 70% female. We do try hard in this area (e.g. 8 out 13 people on our Organisational Committee are female, we try for balance in speakers, etc.). But I have no idea if that really has an effect or not. Our stats are generally mimicked to some degree in other DH training events. Where it isn't represented is in the authors/presenters at DH conferences (as you know from linking to ScottW's work in this area). Anecdotally I'm told that "Women do training, and Men present at conferences" with explanations for this usually pointing out that it is the PIs of projects that do the presenting, while the more junior members of projects often undertake the training. This is then perhaps more of a reflection of the academic community as a whole where statistically those PIs are still mostly men and those junior members most women. I don't think we (the TEI Technical Council) can really change this except by leading by example and encouraging lots of good female (and other marginalised groups) to stand where they have skills and time to give to the TEI Consortium. that will benefit the TEI Consortium and who mostly haven't participated before. It really wasn't difficult to come up with a list of names to nominate and I've thought of about a dozen more (who I can nominate next year...) What I have done in compiling my list of people to nominate is merely to decide this year not to nominate all the men I know who also have things to give, since history tells us they are much more likely to self-nominate. I have also nominated Gabby Bodard even though I don't believe he will accept. the _studentship_ to only women, especially since the majority of people taking such training tend to be women already, as long as you are providing a safe space for that learning. (c.f. DHOxSS adoption of the ADHO Code of Conduct as part of the ADHO Training Network... while we haven't really needed it, it advertises that we intend the summer school to be such a safe space for academic discourse and learning.) The gap isn't in having women trained in TEI (I know lots!), it is having them be that much more interested in it that they have any desire to learn more about hand writing ODDs, our build process, etc. and their willingness to self-nominate compared to men. So I've nominated loads and the response from most of them has been to thank me for thinking that they are so technically competent and how honoured they are that I have nominated them. This is, of course, ridiculous because any of the women I nominated are perfectly reasonable candidates for Council. They are technically savvy and in some cases moreso than me, and so if they had the least bit desire to run for Council they *should* have been self-nominating. But some people feel a stigma is attached to that in some way (I clearly don't since I don't believe anyone has nominated me in the last decade other than myself).

Concerning Martin’s decision to not stand again for Council: While I do admire this step I do not think it will significantly raise the chances for a woman to be elected. Only because there will be one less man standing; that more women are standing because we've given them a prod by nominating them will have that effect any way. I believe Martin to be a better contributor to TEI Council than myself and if he would agree to stand I'd be willing to not stand in exchange to salve his conscience. (Though I know he may have other travel-related reasons for not wanting to stand.)

Hence, if there’s a real political will to change this, we’d need a quota. Yet, I’ve always seen the Council as a technical work group, not a political body. But it’s true we can and must do more for the dissemination of the required skills — but I’m not really sure how to achieve this?! I'm against the idea of quotas in any form, medium, or infrastructure. (I don't want to have a bandwidth quota, or an email quota either, and don't want a quota for any particular group on Council.) It is about social change not political change. If there is political will to help to enact that social change, then great. All I want is for the TEI Technical Council to be filled with people who do good work in furthering the maintenance and development of the Guidelines and related software, as well as related activities. I want the community to take on even more education, outreach, and production of materials which make is simple for users to start using the TEI. I don't really _care_ about the gender of the individuals who do that, except in that I want it to be reflective of the community and don't want anyone to feel they can't participate. Indeed, like the rest of you I suspect, I want *more* people to participate, at all levels and abilities. In a community like TEI the more people participating the better.

Sorry for such a long answer. -James -- Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.uk Academic IT Services, University of Oxford

I wrote a sternly worded letter to the nominations committee after the last election, complaining about the complete lack of balance on the slate. Elena responded that they were just as upset, but that the nominees were the nominees. Last year I didn’t nominate anyone else, but I self-nominated. Elli, for example, didn’t self-nominate (partly just because she was busy and not paying attention) and therefore didn’t get on the slate, so we ended up with an even worse gender balance. A number of us resolved to do better this year, and so far it looks like it’s working, which is good. I will be very sorry not to have Martin on Council next year, as he is a major contributor (as well as being very smart and generous and all-round pleasant to work with), but I absolutely respect his decision. I should say too that achieving a sane gender balance is something that might take a couple of election cycles: if we were 50/50 on the upcoming election and then 50/50-ish (odd number of candidates) in the next one, then we’d have balance. We don’t necessarily have to be 50/50 after this election—not that it would be bad if we were, of course.

On Aug 6, 2015, at 14:12 , Martin Holmes wrote:

...

...

Concerning Martin’s decision to not stand again for Council: While I do admire this step I do not think it will significantly raise the chances for a woman to be elected. Only because there will be one less man standing; that more women are standing because we've given them a prod by nominating them will have that effect any way. I believe Martin to be a better contributor to TEI Council than myself and if he would agree to stand I'd be willing to not stand in exchange to salve his conscience. (Though I know he may have other travel-related reasons for not wanting to stand.)

I don't believe I'm in any way a better contributor than James, of course; he knows far more about the TEI than I do, and has many more years of experience. But that's not really the point. The gender issue is the main reason I'm not standing, and there are two aspects to it:

- If we have a slate which has fewer men and more women, we'll have a much better chance of having more women elected. That's especially the case if men who are more experienced step back, because they would otherwise presumably attract significant proportions of the vote.

- I no longer feel comfortable serving on a Council which is so unbalanced. That's of course no reflection on any individual Council members, present or past; you all know how much I enjoy Council work and in particular the face-to-face meetings. But I'm now so uncomfortable with the situation that I have to do something.

Deb Verhoeven's speech at DH 2015 had a powerful effect on me:

https://soundcloud.com/deb-verhoeven/sets/digital-humanities-2015

It's really about the inertia of entrenched seniority, and the fact that only positive action -- not quotas or rules but people voluntarily vacating their positions because they see that the present situation is unacceptable -- is going to work.

I'm not suggesting or recommending that anyone else do it, and I've had feedback both positive and negative from both men and women. But I can't think of anything else to do at this point.

Cheers, Martin

On 15-08-06 10:28 AM, James Cummings wrote:

...

On 06/08/15 15:39, Peter Stadler wrote:

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I’m more concerned with the political issue of gender balance. That’s an issue with most software projects and most of the DH community[1].

Since this is a public list, I'd like to defend certain segments of the DH community here. Some try really quite hard to work on gender (and other) balances wherever feasible. With my DHOxSS hat on I'd point out that we provide a safe space for training, regardless of gender, but have a turn out of about 70% female. We do try hard in this area (e.g. 8 out 13 people on our Organisational Committee are female, we try for balance in speakers, etc.). But I have no idea if that really has an effect or not. Our stats are generally mimicked to some degree in other DH training events. Where it isn't represented is in the authors/presenters at DH conferences (as you know from linking to ScottW's work in this area). Anecdotally I'm told that "Women do training, and Men present at conferences" with explanations for this usually pointing out that it is the PIs of projects that do the presenting, while the more junior members of projects often undertake the training. This is then perhaps more of a reflection of the academic community as a whole where statistically those PIs are still mostly men and those junior members most women. I don't think we (the TEI Technical Council) can really change this except by leading by example and encouraging lots of good female (and other marginalised groups) to stand where they have skills and time to give to the TEI Consortium.

...

I do not know how to solve this, but projects that come to mind are e.g. „Rails girls“[2]. As a form of outreach that is good. For my own part, in addition to standing again myself to help with such mentoring if the community wishes, I've (openly to them) nominated a total of 14 women for board or council. I know that *some* of them have accepted and so we should have a nice healthy slate. (I hope this isn't counter-productive in dividing the vote somehow.) I should stress, however, lest there be any misunderstanding: I have not nominated these people because they happen to be women, I've nominated people who I believe have technical or other skills that will benefit the TEI Consortium and who mostly haven't participated before. It really wasn't difficult to come up with a list of names to nominate and I've thought of about a dozen more (who I can nominate next year...) What I have done in compiling my list of people to nominate is merely to decide this year not to nominate all the men I know who also have things to give, since history tells us they are much more likely to self-nominate. I have also nominated Gabby Bodard even though I don't believe he will accept.

...

Maybe we should offer special TEI training sessions to women by female(?) tutors? There have been many training sessions by excellent tutors who happen to be female -- it seems strange to me to somehow limit the _studentship_ to only women, especially since the majority of people taking such training tend to be women already, as long as you are providing a safe space for that learning. (c.f. DHOxSS adoption of the ADHO Code of Conduct as part of the ADHO Training Network... while we haven't really needed it, it advertises that we intend the summer school to be such a safe space for academic discourse and learning.)

The gap isn't in having women trained in TEI (I know lots!), it is having them be that much more interested in it that they have any desire to learn more about hand writing ODDs, our build process, etc. and their willingness to self-nominate compared to men. So I've nominated loads and the response from most of them has been to thank me for thinking that they are so technically competent and how honoured they are that I have nominated them. This is, of course, ridiculous because any of the women I nominated are perfectly reasonable candidates for Council. They are technically savvy and in some cases moreso than me, and so if they had the least bit desire to run for Council they *should* have been self-nominating. But some people feel a stigma is attached to that in some way (I clearly don't since I don't believe anyone has nominated me in the last decade other than myself).

...

Concerning Martin’s decision to not stand again for Council: While I do admire this step I do not think it will significantly raise the chances for a woman to be elected. Only because there will be one less man standing; that more women are standing because we've given them a prod by nominating them will have that effect any way. I believe Martin to be a better contributor to TEI Council than myself and if he would agree to stand I'd be willing to not stand in exchange to salve his conscience. (Though I know he may have other travel-related reasons for not wanting to stand.)

...

Hence, if there’s a real political will to change this, we’d need a quota. Yet, I’ve always seen the Council as a technical work group, not a political body. But it’s true we can and must do more for the dissemination of the required skills — but I’m not really sure how to achieve this?! I'm against the idea of quotas in any form, medium, or infrastructure. (I don't want to have a bandwidth quota, or an email quota either, and don't want a quota for any particular group on Council.) It is about social change not political change. If there is political will to help to enact that social change, then great. All I want is for the TEI Technical Council to be filled with people who do good work in furthering the maintenance and development of the Guidelines and related software, as well as related activities. I want the community to take on even more education, outreach, and production of materials which make is simple for users to start using the TEI. I don't really _care_ about the gender of the individuals who do that, except in that I want it to be reflective of the community and don't want anyone to feel they can't participate. Indeed, like the rest of you I suspect, I want *more* people to participate, at all levels and abilities. In a community like TEI the more people participating the better.

Sorry for such a long answer.

-James

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