[tei-council] Suggestions

[Peter Boot]

As I said earlier, I cannot be with you in Thursday's conference call.
Here are some thoughts about the agenda items Laurent mentioned.

Outreach

* Would it be a good idea to list national (or regional, or subject
specific) contact persons on the website? The idea being that a someone
starting out using TEI would have a name of somebody willing to give
advice and pointers about how to get started? The contact persons would
not necessarily have the time available to actually create an ODD file
for them or teach them XML, but still, beginners would know someone
willing to give initial guidance. Contact persons could be council
members or other more or less experienced TEI users

* Can we create a number of small but complete sample editions, hosted
at the TEI site or elsewhere, where everything (XML, schema, ODD,
stylesheets, documentation) is freely accessible and documented? I don't
think this would overlap with 'TEI by example', which as I understand it
will provide tutorials rather than full editions.

* Many people still ask 'why should I bother with xml when I can put my
text on a web page and be done with it?' Can't we create a book (or a
perhaps a special issue of a TEI-friendly journal) with a number of
articles that show the advantages of structured encoding for indexing,
text analysis, publication, annotation, visualization, etc.?

Organisation of the council

* Shouldn't we have a searchable council mailing list? If needed, I
believe I can set up a listserv list at surfnet.nl

* But however important a mailing list is, I must confess that I
personally can't really deal with the amount of interruption in one's
day-to-day activities that fully participating in the discussions on the
council mailing list seems to require. I'd much prefer making myself
useful doing things that leave me, to some extent at least, in control
of my own time.

And one more thing:
Extension of the Guidelines
Peter Robinson has been circulating a proposal for facilitating
distributed editions that implies the need for a number of new TEI
attributes. These attributes would make it possible to create linkages
between multiple versions of a single text, and as such facilitate an
integrated presentation of related resources to users. It builds on the
work done by Neel Smith for the Canonical Text Services Protocol. I
think we should discuss with Peter how this might be implemented.

All these suggestions are things I'd be willing to work on.

Hope you have a profitable meeting,
Peter