[tei-council] personography task force

[Christian Wittern]

Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz at oucs.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> some of you are sending me names and volunteering to discuss
> personography. It is already
> clear that there are at least 8 people on the council alone who want to
> take part.

This seems to be a hot topic at the moment.

> There are 3 ways to proceed:
>
>  a) make it a council subset meeting
>  b) elect a leader who will invite his/her best shots and sorry, being
> on the council doesn't guarentee you a seat
>  c) invite all and sundry (ie TEI-L) to make a pitch as to why they
> should take part, and pick the
>     8 candidates who make the most convincing case (to be judged by
> Christian)
>
> views?

Well, the more I think of it the less I like to hurry this through.  I
would propose a two-layered approach:

1) For the things that need immediate fix in P5 (e.g. datatypes et.al)
   Lou promised to write a position paper by the end of the year.
   This could serve as a base for decisions in a tight time-frame. 
   personography per se would be out of scope for this.

2) We encourage all those interested in this to immediately start
   experimenting by creating extensions that do what people want to do
   with these persons.  It would also sensible to form a SIG and encourage
   communication there.  After a while (6, 12 months?) we look
   at the output of this group and decide whether to charge a more
   formal work group or let the SIG continue or have a one-off,
   focused meeting on a defined range of topics to iron out some open
   points.

This could be seen as a testbed for future development in the TEI -
more community based, less relying on an inner circle of all-round
experts.  I think it is also a Good Thing (tm) to do standardization
based on existing implementation and praxis, rather than out-of-the-blue.

comments? views?

Christian


-- 

 Christian Wittern 
 Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
 47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN