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

[Martin Mueller]

Kevin,

Thanks for the clarification. I should have read the rules, but I may not
be the only who hasn't read them as closely as they should.

If we go by the SIG rules, the SIG's are creatures of the Council, who
approves them and is responsible for appointing a coordinator and
supervising whatever bureaucratic activities are associated with them. The
Board's only interest in the SIG's is that requests for outside funding
must be approved by the Board.

That is a sensible model, and I'd be happy to get the Board out of any SIG
business except when it comes to money.

My question is indeed whether from the perspective of the SIG's a
coordinator is nesecessary, and after reading the rules, I would
reformulate my proposal in terms of distributing the responsibilities of
the SIG coordinator. Let a prospective SIG convener approach the Council
chair or some member of the Council to sponsor a proposal or "friend" it.
If a SIG proposal can't get a "friend" on the Council, it's probably not a
high priority item.

MM


On 6/20/11 4:32 PM, "Kevin Hawkins" <kevin.s.hawkins at ultraslavonic.info>
wrote:

>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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