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

Tue Jun 21 23:35:33 EDT 2011

Susan,

If you would like to continue as SIG coordinator pending the appointment of
a successor I will be delighted. I had assumed that you wanted to get out of
this. $8,000.00 were budgeted, and are ready to be spent following customary
procedures.

Forgive me for making some skeptical observations about the three pillars of
the TEI. An organization like the TEI could work without a board, and it
could work without a formal arrangement for special interest groups. It
could not work without the maintenance and development of the standard that
is its reason for being, and it could not work without the people whose task
it is to maintain and develop that standard. In the case of the TEI that is
the Council.

I am a classicist whose work has been shaped by Aristotle's Poetics and in
particular by his observation that "plot is the soul of tragedy." So the
Council is the heart and soul of the TEI. It is the place where almost all
of the intellectual work takes place. My personal view, for what it is
worth, is that it was not a good idea to give the Board a role in making
decisions about SIGs. The original model of making the SIGs creatures of the
Council was a better model: the intellectual work of the SIGs feeds into the
Council, and the Council should make decisions about SIGS, whether directly
or through some delegation.

I am a faculty member and take a properly dim view of what boards can or
should do. The council is, so to speak, the faculty of the TEI.  The Board
should be the Council's servant and facilitator. The SIGs are children of
the Council. Nothing is more important than children, but the appropriate
parents in this case are the Council, not the Board.

I'll live with whatever decisions the Council and Board take, but I would
like to say very emphatically that in my view the Council is the heart of
the TEI and that the organizational structure should reflect this very
emphatically. 

MM 

From:  Susan Schreibman <susan.schreibman at gmail.com>
Reply-To:  <tei-board at lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Date:  Tue, 21 Jun 2011 19:27:56 +0100
To:  <tei-board at lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Subject:  Re: [tei-board] [tei-council] About encouraging, supporting, and
coordinating SIG's

 Dan, I could not agree with you more. It was my belief that the work we
have been doing at the Board and Council level to reinforce the SIGs (making
them, as you suggest, a third pillar of the TEI) has been extremely
successful. It has been wonderful for outreach and community building.
Moreover, the SIGs, more so in recent years, have contributed directly to
the technical work of the Council.

 The SIG Coordinator has had a primary role in this. In the ways that Dan
describes (the SIG lunches, SIG grants, etc), but in my role there has been
much behind the scenes work. Dealing with personnel issues, taking decisions
(in consultation with the Board and Council) on when to drop SIGs and
facilitating new ones. Laurent and I worked closely on a process for new
SIGs to be approved and as far as I know that process has served us well.
Having one point person for the SIGs is transparent and allows for clear
channels of communication between the SIG Conveners, as well as between the
SIGs and the Board and Council.

 The distributed process you are proposing I strongly believe will not serve
the community well and will weaken the SIGs and their contributions to the
community. I believe it will be seen as an about turn by the Board and send
the wrong signal to the SIGs, their Conveners, and the community.

 I find it difficult to understand the motivations behind such a radical
approach to the SIGs. The system we have is not broken, so why break it? As
Dan suggests, a review of our processes is important to take from time to
time, but in this case I think the proposal you have put advocated will not
forward the work of the TEI.

 Several weeks ago I wrote to the Board list and suggested that I move
forward the SIG grants as they have already been budgeted. I received no
response.

 susan

 On 21/06/2011 18:07, O'Donnell, Dan wrote:
>   I think Martin this only makes sense if you see the SIGs as "workgroups"
> rather than Laurent's spectrum approach. And it is a pretty radical rethink of
> their function and purpose.
>  
>  Not all the SIGs have a direct connection to council work. Education, for
> example. Moreover, abandoning a community interest group because it doesn't
> happen to interest council members sends out an incredibly bad message to the
> community. SIGs are by their very nature community expressions of interest and
> support in the TEI. And they cost next-to-nothing. Cutting them because we
> don't find what they are doing interesting would be a terrible step backward.
>  
>  While I thought the idea of distributing the SIG convenor was impractible but
> an interesting thought experiment, I hope you'll forgive me for saying that I
> think this idea would actually be harmful to us. My vote here would be an
> emphatic no.
>  
>  Again, my two cents and I hope one that can be taken in the spirit of
> vigorous and energetic debate!
>  
>  -dan
>  
>  On 11-06-20 03:16 PM, Martin Mueller wrote:
>>  
>> 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>
>> <mailto: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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>>>  
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>>  
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>  
>  
>  
> -- 
>  Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
>  Professor of English, University of Lethbridge <http://www.uleth.ca/>
>  Co-President, Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias
> interactifs <http://www.sdh-semi.org/>
>  Co-Editor, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique
> <http://www.digitalstudies.org/>
>  Founding Editor, Digital Medievalist
> <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal>
>  
> 
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>  

-- 
Susan Schreibman, PhD
Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities
School of English
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2, Ireland

email: susan.schreibman at tcd.ie
phone: +353 1 896 3694
fax:  +353 1 671 7114

check out the new MPhil in Digital Humanities at TCD
http://www.tcd.ie/English/postgraduate/digital-humanities/

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