[tei-council] Looking ahead

[Christian Wittern]

Dear Council members,

During the meeting in Maryland, I've heard a lot of nice things about
P5; if even 10 percent is true it can't be too bad.  Once again, thanks
to you all for the effort that made this possible.

However, it is not time to rest on what has been achieved.  As a
result of the elections (or more precisely of the slate of
candidates), there will be quite a change in the membership of the
Council, including a change of the chair.  This will be the biggest
change in the Council so far and a number of the outgoing members have
been part of the Council more or less since it started work.

I would like to use the weeks ahead before the end of the term for the
six outgoing members to think about what tasks lie ahead for the Council and
how we would think of tackling it.  This list might come in handy as a
reference for the new Council, as it settles in and gets into
gear (it might as well be thrown out at the first meeting of the new
Council, but that is fine also); but it should be clear that the
agenda for the next year or so has to be decided by the new team and
its chair.

The role of the TEI Council has, in my view, changed over the time of
its existence.  The designation is "to superintend the technical work
of the TEI-C"[1], which I for one have always interpreted as
"maintenance of the Guidelines".  In the beginning the Council's
mode of operation has been to charge working groups and monitor their
outcome.  This proved insufficient for the kind of large-scale
plumbing needed for P5, and so at some point the META task force was
formed, which active members consisted almost exclusively of Council
members.  Gradually, the Council then started to consider itself as
*the* working group and in the last two or so years, the lion share of
the work has been done within the Council by Council members.  At the
moment I think it is fair to say that the Council has become the place
where work for the TEI gets done.  With P5 delivered, we could
therefore continue to redefine the task of the Council and charge it
with tasks that have been previously out of scope, such as development
of introductory materials, tutorials, active compilation of exemplary
texts and examples etc.

In early 2007, I asked Dan and Sebastian to join me in the "planning
subcommittee" to lay out the work plan and monitor the progress in the
run up to P5.  In my view, this has been very successful and it seems
to be a model that could be continued and even institutionalized as a
steering committee for TEI activities that are "technical" in a broad
sense and therefore fall out of scope for the Board.

It goes without saying that the feasibility and details of such plans have
to be considered carefully, and I would suggest that the Council
should take the necessary time to figure things out, instead (or rather, on
top) of returning to business as usual.

Well, I am looking forward to an interesting discussion.

A good weekend to everybody,

Christian


[1] http://www.tei-c.org/About/bylaws.xml#TEIby-A6.2

-- 

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