Naming of things

[Burnard Towers]

We have variously used the terms "work group", "subcommittee", and  "task
force" for groups of people doing stuff for the TEI. Here's what I believe
to be the case -- comments/corrections welcomed

a "TEI work group" is a group of people specifically chartered by the TEI
Council, but not forming part of it. It conducts its business according to
the provisions of EDW54, with a formal charge and an agreed programme of
work subject to review by the council. Its chair is ex officio a member of
the council.  It may be funded.

a "TEI task force" is a subgroup of the Council membership, to which the
Council delegates a specific task, with a nominated chair, usually without
funding, and usually to achieve a specific and relatively short term
objective. It may behave like an edw54-defined  workgroup if it so wishes,
but is not required to. It may subpoena additional (non-Council) members,
with the permission of the Council at the request of its chair.

a "TEI subcommittee" is a subgroup of the Council membership, to which the
Council delegates a long term or intermittent activity.

The existing workgroups are Character Encoding, Migration, and Standoff.  We
have a subcommittee on Training, and we have a Library Taskforce which has
just completed sterling work on a grant proposal. We have just agreed to set
up a Workgroup on Feature structures, and Taskforces on Metalanguage and
Manuscript Description.

Thinking about it again, and reviewing the definitions above, I wonder
whether we might not do better to make the Metalanguage bunch into a
workgroup.

We do not yet have a term for the activity we asked Patrick Durusau to carry
out: namely to research a specific field (alone or in combination with
whoever he likes to invite) and propose whether or not the Council should
set up a  workgroup (or taskforce).  (I'm also a bit worried that Pat seems
to think he has been charged with forming a workgroup, which I don't think
we'd agreed to)

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