[tei-council] file names voting results

Christian Wittern wittern at kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Fri Sep 8 20:54:46 EDT 2006


James Cummings <James.Cummings at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
writes:

> sebastian rahtz wrote:

>> I am still unclear as to whether most people who
>> voted "yes" expected the ID of the <div1> to change
>> as well as the filename, and whether they expected
>> the name of the generatd HTML to change as well.

>
> For the record, in my mind, the proposal was solely for the change of filenames,
> so that those checking out the subversion modules would not have to work through
> another layer of obfuscation.

The proposal was a bit fuzzy about what exactly would be the target,
but on the face of it the focus was on the files in the SVN system.

While I think it would make more sense to make the substitutions
throughout the system, I see that the current state of things does not
carry a mandate for this, so I am happy to stick to the letter of the
proposal and limit the changes to the filenames in the SVN system.

>
>> I have some sympathy with Lou's view that
>> the Council should not in general micro-manage
>> the work of the editors, but since the Council
>> _was_ bothered about it, _has_ discussed the matter,
>> and come to a clear decision, we now cannot
>> avoid dealing with the ramifications.

To be honest, I do not think "micro-manage" is the right word to use
here.  


I understand this in a way that it would basically mean for the
editors say to the Council, "this is none of your business, mind your
own stuff", whereas the whole proposal was raised to improve the
communication between the editors and the Council.  Now, the editors
are paid to work on this and naturally have over the years spend a lot
of time with the source of the Guidelines; this makes it only
naturally that the meaning of the cryptic two-letter abbreviations has
become second nature to them.  In contrast to this, the Council
members, elected for two-year terms, do their work completely
voluntarily, most often by chopping time from a schedule that is
already busy without the additional workload from serving on the
Council.  It should be obvious from this, that anything that can be
done to lower the bar of getting up to speed with this work could be a
significant improvement to effectiveness of the work of the Council as
a whole.  It is out of this desire to improve the operational base of
the Council work that this proposal was borne, and I can only assume
that this was also the reason that it was supported by a wide margin.


This most decidedly is *not* _micro-managing_ things only the editors
should be concerned with, but trying to remove impediments that
prevent the communication within the Council from being more
effective.  

> I think we are spending more time arguing about whether we should be doing this
> than would be wasted in just deciding and doing it.

This was my hope as well.

All the best,

Christian

-- 

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



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