Council meeting, January 12, 2002

[John Unsworth]

Dear Council and Board members:

The TEI Council met for the first time on January 12th, 2002,  in London, 
at Kings' College. The TEI Consortium is grateful for Board member Harold 
Short's assistance in arranging for the meeting venue. This is an interim 
and summary report on the meeting and its results, written on the plane on 
the way home, from the Chair's memory and notes: official minutes (taken by 
Geoff Rockwell, with corroborating notes by Merrilee Proffitt) will be 
posted to the Council for corrections and approval within the week, and 
added to the members' web site within two weeks.  If those minutes differ 
from what follows in any particular, the minutes should be considered the 
authoritative record.

Attending:
         Syd Bauman, editor
         Lou Burnard, editor
         Matthew Driscoll
         David Durand
         Merrilee Proffitt
         Sebastian Rahtz, Board representative
         Geoff Rockwell
         Laurent Romary
         John Unsworth, Chair
         Perry Willett
         Christian Wittern

Unable to Attend:
         David Birnbaum
         Tomaz Erjavec
         Fotis Jannidis

The Council met from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m., with two breaks totalling less 
than half an hour.  Discussions were animated but cordial, and very productive.

Agenda items and results:

1.  Charge to the Council from the Board--areas of responsibility and rules 
of operation.

Bylaws Article VI, section 2, were reviewed and read aloud.

2.  Review of P4 and the comments of end users

P4 will include the description of tag contexts (parents, children, etc.) 
in each tag description, as in P3.

Editors will revise Chapter 4 (character sets) in light of the report of 
the Character Encoding workgroup, and circulate the revision to the Council 
and the workgroup for comment, within the next few weeks.

Chapter 2 (Gentle introduuction to XML) needs and will receive further 
revision.

Editors will spell out in the chapter on linking the officially sanctioned, 
entity-based strategy for XML references to URLs, but will also note an 
unofficial but sensible strategy for direct XML reference, in an attribute 
value, for those not using catalogues.

Print-on-Demand pricing for P4 is now urgently needed.  If David Seaman is 
unable to procure a quote, the Chair will pursue one separately.  When such 
a quote is available, the Council will discuss the size of a hard-bound 
print run for P4, by email.

3.  Future direction of P5

P5 will not necessarily be tied to SGML support.

P5 should probably include the ODD facilities that the editors use to 
produce the TEI guidelines and DTD--in other words, should incorporate and 
document the ODD DTD

P5 should extend the work of the Character Set working group, in particular 
addressing  XML:Lang and TEI:Lang

P5 should have a well understood and clearly articulated strategy for 
adopting, supplementing, and referencing other relevant standards. 
Character encoding and linking, schemas, and metadata were some areas where 
the Council needs to decide a strategy in this regard.

The Council decided that it should, in effect, consider itself a workgroup 
for the purpose of addressing some key strategic and infrastructural issues 
in planning for P5, for example schemas, DTDs, namespaces.  The Council 
also decided not to turn to those issues until P4 was put to bed, some time 
this spring.  [From discussions subsequent to the meeting, and the Chair's 
own autocratic scheduling impulse: When the Council does begin discussion 
of these issues, probably some time in April, we will ask Perry Willett to 
host regular conference calls, and we will endeavor to provide a 
preliminary overview of the issues to the Board's May meeting.]

In the course of this discussion it became clear that not all Council 
members are subscribers or constituents of member institutions, and 
therefore haven't had access to the "members only" section of the web 
site.  The Chair will propose to the Board that they be given that access 
in order to facilitate their work.

The Council agreed to discuss Fotis Jannidis' query about cooperation with 
other groups (in this case, historians) by email, over the coming weeks, 
and to treat it as a particular instance of a general case.

4.  Workgroups needed, and funding available

Christian Wittern will continue the current workgroup on Character Encoding 
for long enough to review the revision of P4, chapter 4 (to be completed in 
a matter of weeks).  He is then appointed by the Council to establish a new 
workgroup, with a budget of $8,000, to address character set and language 
issues for P5.  That workgroup will provide an interim report to the Board 
meeting in May, a draft report to the Members' meeting in October, and a 
final report to the next Council meeting in January of 2003 (possibly to be 
held in Washington, D.C.).

David Durand will establish a workgroup on linking, with the same budget 
and schedule as the Character Encoding workgroup.

The Council will review EDW54, a document written by Michael 
Sperberg-McQueen to detail the rights and responsibilities of 
workgroups.  Comments and revision will be done by email, by the end of 
January.  A preliminary review of the document at the meeting suggested 
that it was useful and relevant, and would need relatively little updating.

The Chair will draft a release to be signed by members of future 
workgroups, granting the TEI Consortium a perpetual, non-exclusive license 
to intellectual property such members might produce in the course of their 
work for the TEI, and agreeing to have that work edited by the TEI editors 
before it is included in TEI publications.

Workgroup issues raised by the NEH grant were referred to that agenda item 
(next).  Future workgroups are treated under the discussion of the Estate 
proposal (item 6, below).

Standard term for a workgroup will be one year, renewable.  Standard 
practice will be to appoint a chair, perhaps recommending some members but 
not mandating them, and providing a budget rather than dictating a number 
of participants or meetings.  Workgroups should hold at least one physical 
meeting, and must report at least once, during the year.

5.  NEH grant

The Council reviewed the history and the revised plan of work, schedule, 
and budget of the NEH grant-funded project on XMLization of the 
TEI.  [Though this was not discussed, the Chair remarks that we should 
probably change the PI for this grant from Steve DeRose to John Unsworth, 
given that Steve is not at present a TEI editor, and the grant now resides 
at Virginia.]  Good progress has been made on this project, and some work 
still needs to be billed, especially by Oxford: Oxford was reminded that 
federal monies have a tendency to revert to the funder if they are not 
spent within the term of the grant.  The work remaining is principally 
focused on the migration of existing TEI/SGML resources into XML, and the 
provision of documentation, methods, and tools for that migration.  This 
work is to be carried out by a workgroup consisting of six experts, 
consulting with ten representatives of large holdings, and with the 
assistance of the TEI technical writer (at Oxford).  The Council agreed 
that the Chair should ask John Price-Wilkin to chair the experts workgroup, 
and the Council generated a list of names to suggest to John, should he 
accept, for membership of both the workgroup and the users group.

6.  The Estate Project

The Council recognized the usefulness of the Estate proposal to the TEI 
Consortium, especially as it promises to provide funding for an expanded 
training regimen.  The Council also recognized that the Consortium should 
have some published description and standard rules for this sort of 
collaboration, spelling out how to approach the Consortium for partnership 
in grant proposals, how to ensure necessary intellectual and technical 
control for the Council in collaborative projects, etc.. Many of these 
issues will be handled by the subcommittee on consulting and services (see 
below); for matters pertaining specifically to the Estate proposal, the 
Chair will email Tone Merete Bruvik in the next week, to request some 
clarifications and perhaps some minor revisions.

The Council is particularly pleased to note that the two workgroups likely 
to be called into being if the Estate proposal is successful correspond 
closely to the Council's next two area of interests, after Character 
Encoding and Linking, namely Metadata and Transcription of Primary Sources.

7.  Training and services

Geoff Rockwell, Sebastian Rahtz, and Perry Willett will form a subcommittee 
on training.  In time for the May meeting of the Board, they will survey 
existing TEI training (including the materials used in that training) and 
recommend a course of action for the TEI with respect to training.  A 
number of options were discussed, and the subcommittee was advised to 
invite Julia Flanders (recently charged by the Board with investigating 
training) to be a part of their discussion.

Matthew Driscoll, Merrilee Proffitt, and Laurent Romary will form a 
subcommittee on consulting and certification, to investigate costs, 
benefits, and parallels in the area of data validation, software 
certification and test suites, TEI developer sites, etc..  They will also 
make a recommendation to the Board by the time of its May meeting.

The Council recommended trademarking the name "Text Encoding Initiative" so 
that it would be protected, if we do end up using it for certifying 
training or services.  The Chair will pursue that, with lawyers he knows 
only too well.

----------------------
John Unsworth
Chair, TEI Council