[tei-council] About encouraging, supporting, and coordinating SIG's

[Kevin Hawkins]

Martin, I can't post to tei-board, so feel free to forward to that list 
if you think it's appropriate.

To make sure we all agree on terminology, I wonder what you mean by "the 
SIG chair".  According to the "SIG Rules and Regulations" ( 
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SIG/rules.xml ) and according to common 
usage in the community, each SIG has a *convenor* (or co-convenors), and 
the Council appoints a *SIG coordinator* from among its members to be a 
liason to SIGs.  Are you wondering whether individual SIGs gain from 
having a SIG convenor (for that SIG) or a SIG coordinator (from Council 
as a liason)?

Kevin

On 6/20/2011 4:59 PM, Martin Mueller wrote:
> Dear Colleague,
>
> This is a memo to both the Board and the Council about SIG's, how to
> encourage, support, and coordinate them. It is a topic where deliberation
> and decision belong both in the Board and the Council. It may be that quite
> a few issues straddle those two entities.
>
> I sat in on a SIG discussion at the Council and have had so far inconclusive
> discussions about the SIG chair. But I also have begun to wonder whether
> from the perspective of a particular SIG a SIG chair is a good thing. By
> their very nature SIG's come and go. They differ in their purposes and may
> go about their business in different ways. The may not need coordinating,
> and they may have little interest in lateral communication, but each will
> want access to and support from the Board and the Council. Whether those
> goals are helped by another layer of bureaucracy is open to question.
>
> Here is a different and flatter model.  Each SIG should have a 'sponsor' on
> the Council, who would also be the co-chair of the SIG.  A SIG reports to
> the Council and the Board, with the Council in the lead. Funding requests
> come to the Board through the Council.  The Board decides how much to
> allocate to SIGs, but the Council ranks particular proposals. This way of
> doing business would probably scale comfortably to half a dozen active SIGs,
> would give each SIG chair direct access to the chairs of the Council and the
> Board, and would, I think, produce better conversation and decision making.
>
> A proposal of this kind can be implemented in several flavours.  I throw it
> out here as a starting point for further discussion.
>
>
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