[tei-council] on META and P5EC

[Syd Bauman]

Sebastian & Lou have suggested in TCW05
(http://www.tei-c.org/Council/tcw05.html) that "Council may wish to
consider replacing the current Meta work-group with a new 'P5
Editorial Committee'". While I think consideration may be a useful
exercise, at the moment I think Council should reject this idea.

META should not be disbanded. While their work has reached an
important stage, and they are taking a well-deserved and appropriate
respite, it is not a foregone conclusion that there won't be more
work to do. Besides major issues like co-occurrence constraints and
the Durand conundrum, there are also minor issues that may arise,
including delving further into the meaning and application of
<equiv>, adding features for handling overlapping hierarchies easier,
and constructing datatypes that more properly represent textual data
(I'm thinking of dates & times here, but there may be others).

Moreover, I will not be at all surprised if the first time ODD is
employed to create some other tagset (besides P5) problems we've not
anticipated arise.

The general idea of a P5 editorial committee is probably a good one.
But I'm of the (strong) opinion that Council *is* that committee.
This is what you were elected to do. Being on Council involves work,
including (to some extent) overseeing the editors, and you should be
doing it. While Council has the authority to farm this responsibility
out to another committee (and there may be reasons for doing so that
Lou & Sebastian have thought of that haven't occurred to me), I'm of
a mind that if it is too unwieldy to have all of Council more
involved (and I'm inclined to say it shouldn't be), that Council
should generate a subcommittee of itself for this purpose.