new EDW54 changes list (fwd)

[Lou Burnard]

Here's a brief report (prepared by Syd) on the changes made by the editors
in response to comments on edw54 from Council members

There are undoubtedly further issues to be discussed/resolved but it would
be good to know whether the council as a whole now feels it can endorse
the content of this document as the way forward.

At some point soon the Council should also review the "charge" for the
charsets working group and specify any changes required in that. And we
also need to draft a charge for the group which it was agreed to charter
on xlinkage.

But right now, we editors are focussing our attentions on P4!

Lou And Syd

<p>-----

Changed file to XML. Changed "ACH/ACL/ALLC Text Encoding Initiative"
to "Text Encoding Initiative Consortium" in the <authority> in
<publicationStmt> in <teiHeader>.

From: Tomaz Erjavec <Tomaz.Erjavec at ijs.si>

> 1. The preamble obviously needs to be changed.
Done.

> 2. Everywhere "TEI executive committee" and "TRC" should be changed to
>    "TEI-C Council"
Done (except in "Status:", where it really does refer to the now extinct body).

> 3. Does "(TEI central) secretariat" still exist or should it be changed
>    to (TEI-C) secretary"?
In general changed to "TEI Consortium secretary".

> 4 "TEI participants"  to "TEI-C members" (& board?) (&other WG
>   members?)
In general this was changed to "TEI Consortium members".

> 5. I guess it should be stated whether members/heads of WGs have to be
>    members of the consortium, and, like the council, whether they have
>    access to the members' web space. I'd suggest no and yes.
Added "Being a Consortium member is not a prerequisite for serving on
a work group." under 'Membership'. I think by now we're settled on the
web space issue: non-Consortium members do not have access to the
'members only' area of the web space, regardless of what other rela-
tionship they have with TEI. Since it makes perfect sense that non-
Consortium members might need access to some particular documents, and
because in all other cases requests for documents were sent to what
was then the central secretariat, I've added a clause to that
effect. See below.

> 6. SGML to XML...
Done.

<p>From: Merrilee Proffitt <Merrilee_Proffitt at notes.rlg.org>

> "... TEI-chartered work groups, whether internal (funded by the TEI),
> external (funded by some other body, but recognized by the TEI and
> given a TEI work group charter), or mixed (anything else or anything
> in between)."
Changed.

> Knock out the bit about ", gleaned from the authors' experience in
> work group meetings both inside and outside the TEI."
Clause deleted.

> Do work groups get appointed by board under recommendation by the
> council, or simply by the council? The bylaw say that we [the Council]
> "have the power to create working groups."
Our understanding is that WGs get appointed simply by the Council.

> This paragraph should also introduce the concept of some work items
> going away because other, better, standards have come along and may
> be used instead (MathML or tables being examples).
I'm afraid I don't see why this document (about WG procedures)
should introduce concepts of WG results. Stet.

> **Membership:
> Question: why should membership distribution requirements be waived in the
> case of externally-funded work?
I believe this is so we do not feel compelled to turn down funding
from the Canadian Committee on Excluding Europeans from Text Encoding
(although perhaps we would turn down their funding anyway).

> **Documents:
> Well, should there be an expiration date for documents?
Good question. I [Syd] am inclined to say that boilerplate text should
be provided for when there is an expiration date, but that in general
WG documents should not have one. There may be exceptions, though,
e.g., when a WG document exists to say "this is how we're going to do
it until so-and-so publishes a different standard".
++Open issue. Bracketted statement removed for now.

> What about the boilerplate text? What goes here?
Good question. It appears we've survived for years without it,
although it's not a bad idea. Anyone want to make suggestions?
++Open issue. Bracketted statement removed for now.

> Include a link to TEI A1 and TEI ED W55 (and maybe titles of
> documents, as was done with TEI ED W48?).
Done.

> **Overall:
> Update URLs
Are there more than 1? I updated the one I found to point to main
tei-c.org page.

> Is it work group or Work Group? Should be consistent.
Changed three inappropriate occurences of "Work Group" to "work
group".

> TEI Guidelines or TEI <title>Guidelines</title>?
The latter. Fixed.

> Clarification as to who funds editors'/an editor's travel to work group
> meetings.
Good question. As long as it's not the editor, it's fine with me :-)
Seriously, I think we shouldn't state that the TEI pays for the
editors' attendance in the hopes that we can more easily obtain
outside funding for their attendance.

<p>From: Fotis Jannidis <fotis.jannidis at lrz.uni-muenchen.de>

> "(The TRC may discharge work groups which are making no progress on
> their work items, in order to be able to form a new work group which
> will, it is hoped, have greater success.)"
>
> Maybe the guidelines for discharging a working group should be more
> formalized; this way it is a rather formal process to decide
> whether a working group should be discharged and nothing
> personal. Something like: The TRC should discharge work groups
> which are inactive for a year or longer; a working group is
> inactive if in this time it doesn't publish a working paper or a
> working draft or if there are no reports to the TEI's technical
> review committee.
I [Lou] thought the idea was that WGs were chartered for a maximum
period of one year at a time. In otherwords, every time the WG reports
to the Council, the Council extends (or doesn't) extend its life:
nothing to do with publishing papers or reports or any other
metric. The WG head reports every 6 months, right?

We've moved the clause stating this up front, under "general" (it was
lost down in the text before), and revised following text to read:
 <p>The head of a work group should file a written progress
   report with the TEI Council every six months, or other
   regular interval agreed when the group is chartered. This
   report will form the basis on which the Council may renew
   the work group's charter.</p>
 <p>The Council may discharge inactive work groups: a work
   group is deemed inactive if its head has failed to submit two
   consecutive reports by their due dates.</p>

> "those listed as full members of the work group will be named in
> the acknowledgements to the Guidelines"
> I am not sure I understand the difference between a full member and
> a (temporary?) member. If I understand it correctly in the rest of
> this section, the text is always talking about "full member" and
> maybe this should be done explicitly.
I also am not sure I understand this difference (although it is
possible that by "full member" the original authors meant "one who
the TEI is willing to fund, whether actually funded or not"), but it
seems to me that subsequent references to "member" in this section
applies to any member of a work group. Stet.
Note that this section takes care of the concern that work group
members who are not consortium members would not have access to TEI
internal documents (of which, btw, there are very few) -- work group
members, "have the right to examine technical working papers internal
to the TEI, and to comment on drafts prepared by other work groups".
Which means a work group member who is not a Consortium member can
see any draft of any technical work, but does not have a right to see
a non-public draft of our budget, e.g.

> "Members of work groups may attend (at their own expense)
> meetings of any TEI work group; they may participate in the
> discussion if allowed by the head of the host work group."
> This seems to be a contradiction to the rule, that all TEI
> members have a right to participate in work group discussions:
> "All participants in the TEI (members of the TEI executive
> committee, members of the TRC, members and heads of other work
> groups, and the official representatives of affiliated projects)
> have a right to attend work group meetings (at their own cost),
> and participate in the discussion."
> So the second part of the sentence in the first quote could be
> deleted.
Deleted, and appended "subject to limits set by the work group
head" to the 'rule'.

> "Public documents will normally be placed on TEI file servers;
> TEI-internal documents will be made available to TEI participants
> by the TEI central secretariat upon request."
> replace with:
> "TEI-internal documents will be made available to TEI
> participants in the members only section of the TEI file
> servers."
Changed to
      Public documents will normally be placed on TEI file
      or web servers; TEI-internal documents will be made available to
      TEI Consortium members in the <xref doc="members"><soCalled>members
        only</soCalled> section of the TEI web site</xref>; such
      technical documents will be made available to non-Consortium
      members of workgroups and the Council by the TEI Consortium
      secretary upon request.

> "In particular, the status description should indicate:"
> add: If there exists one, a link should be added which points to
> an earlier paper on this subject created by this working group or
> handed in by some external group. (Quite like the w3c
> recommendations).
Item added:
        <item>bibliographic references or pointers to previous
              versions of the current paper, or other papers on the
              same subject, whether by this working group or handed
              into this working group by some external group</item>

> Maybe the status information should be included into the
> completed text of the guidelines to allow backtracking of changes
> and discussions?
In general, no. By the time a paper has been incorporated into the
Guidelines its status is known: it has been approved by the work
group. A "paper" trail should be kept to allow review of changes and
the discussions that led to them, but that trail is, and should be,
kept in the working group papers, not in the Guidelines themselves.

> The TEI should offer a defined way to make a public comment ...
Agreed, but mostly out of the scope of this paper. Have added
   (In general such comments will be posted to TEI-L or TEI-TECH,
   but could certainly come from elsewhere.)
with links from the list names to their main pages.

> "The head of the work group must file a written progress report
> with the TEI executive committee every six months."
> Is this report supposed to be public (+1)? Or only accessible by
> TEI members?
We believe that left unsaid (as now), it is up to the work group head
filing a report to give it either "public" or "internal" (i.e., TEI
Consortium members only) status as the fourth of the five boilerplate
status items.

> "Some work groups avoid tagging specific examples because the
> members don't feel comfortable with SGML tagging. [...], but you do
> need at least that much."
> Replace this paragraph with something like
> "All work groups should provide simple examples for each feature
> (element, attribute etc.) discussed."
> The w3c has the policy to promote a recommendation from the status
> 'candidate recommendation' to 'recommendation' only if there is at
> least one full implementation. This kind of reality check sounds
> like a good idea.
While it is a good idea that there be at least one real-life encoding
example, and it is also true that the odds of someone being on a work
group and not being familiar with XML tagging has gone way down, the
point of this paragraph is, I believe, that work groups should not
fail to produce recommendations only because of infamiliarity with
XML. The editors can help encode examples properly later.