[tei-council] Approval of SIG for Computer-Mediated Communication.

[James Cummings]

Hi all,

Michael's response is pasted below and is similar to Kevin's 
suggestion. What we would be doing now is approving that the SIG 
will be created, but later this year so it can have its first 
meeting at the TEI conference at which point its mailing list, 
discussions, etc. will be entirely open for all to join.  So they 
are just going to go away as a private group and work up some 
initial proposals (which they are doing already for the 
conference), but knowing that we'll approve them as a SIG in time 
for them to have space/meeting at the conference at which point 
everything is open. (I.e. they don't want to spend lots of time 
working away on this without knowing we're going to approve 
them.)  I don't honestly believe they wish to work in a closed 
manner, just get organised before launching themselves on the 
world and the Conference gives a good deadline.

If that makes it clear, then shortly before the Conference, 
assuming that everything will be openly available, I'd be happy 
to 'pre-approve' them now and then do so officially as a "chair's 
action" shortly before the meeting without bothering Council with 
it again (unless their SIG proposal changes significantly).  That 
way they don't need to wait ages for us to approve them at a busy 
point in time.

Comments?

===
Dear James,

thank you for forwarding the request from the Council to me. I 
absolutely
understand the concerns of Kevin Hawkins concerning the 
'openness' of the
SIG. The idea to start working as a closed group first and then 
open the
discussion for the public in a second step was just motivated by the
intention to first come out with some first suggestions before 
starting
into a broad discussion - in order to not have to deal with too many
different input from too many sides at the very beginning.

Since our own roadmap was to work out some first suggestions 
until October
(see our panel proposal), then present them at the TEI conference 
and - at
this stage of our work - open the discussion for everybody else, what
would you say about the idea to officially get the SIG started on the
occasion of the TEI members meeting in Rome? This would allow us 
to stick
to our idea to first work on some first ideas + suggestions in a 
(pre-SIG)
"core group", then present these first suggestions to the TEI 
public (=
via sourceforge.net as well as - hopefully - in a panel) and then 
invite
everybody who would like to contribute to become a part of the SIG's
activities (= ideally, at a 1st meeting of the SIG at the 
conference). The
work + discussions of the SIG - in the wiki, on SF, in the 
mailing list -
would then completely be open to everybody who wants to participate.

Please let me know if you find this a reasonable and adequate modus
operandi for getting the SIG started.
===


On 04/04/13 16:05, James Cummings wrote:
>
> I've fed back this objection (and linked to this post on the open
> TEI Council Archives as a demonstration of precisely the openness
> you're requesting), and will forward any response I get.
>
> Best,
>
> -James
>
> On 04/04/13 14:54, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
>> The proposal, on p.2 under "Members of the core group:", says that the
>> core group will put their feature requests in SourceForge and then open
>> up discussion.  I take that to mean that they won't have an open list
>> that others can join until they pull together these proposals.  I'm not
>> thrilled about this.  While I have no problem with a group of people
>> formulating proposals on their own and submitting them to SF without
>> advertising their intentions in advance, I don't think the TEI-C should
>> sponsor a SIG that works in a closed way.
>>
>> James, could you ask them to clarify this statement?  Maybe I'm
>> misunderstanding how they want to work.  I would actually be fine if
>> that "core group" put in their proposals and THEN we established the SIG
>> to foster any discussion of the feature requests that people don't want
>> to have on the SF tickets, or to discuss proposals additional feature
>> requests that the core group didn't think of.
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>> On 4/4/2013 8:49 AM, Martin Holmes wrote:
>>> This SIG looks great to me. They make a good case for the need they're
>>> addressing, they know how they want to address it, they have good
>>> collaborative links with other groups, and they're well organized. An
>>> enthusiastic yes from me.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Martin
>>>
>>> On 13-04-04 03:01 AM, James Cummings wrote:
>>>> Dear TEI Technical Council,
>>>>
>>>> You may have noticed that in the agenda for the council meeting I added a:
>>>> Approval of TEI-SIG for "Computer-Mediated Communication", but it occurs
>>>> to me that this could probably just be done on the mailing list.
>>>>
>>>> Find attached (if the mailing list allows attachments, I've forgotten) a
>>>> SIG proposal for a TEI SIG on computer-mediated communication. They also
>>>> have a panel proposed for the TEI Conference (also attached).
>>>>
>>>> You may also remember their article in Issue 3 of the jTEI
>>>> http://jtei.revues.org/476 coming out of their paper at the TEI
>>>> conference in 2011.
>>>>
>>>> I can see no reason why we'd want to prevent formation of this SIG in
>>>> any way as it doesn't significantly overlap with any of the existing
>>>> SIGs. The purpose of the SIG is specifically to develop feature requests
>>>> after discussion and investigation and present these to the council
>>>> which is exactly the process we'd like SIGs to undertake. The precise
>>>> proposals will be judged on their merits when they appear, though of
>>>> course interested Council members are encouraged to join the SIG if we
>>>> approve it. (And this reminds me that I should be editing
>>>> http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SIG/rules.xml to reflect the removal of
>>>> the SIG Coordinator role and its duties having been merged into the
>>>> Council Chair's.)
>>>>
>>>> Does anyone have any one have any comments on the approval or not of
>>>> this SIG?  If we agree it beforehand then that is one less item we need
>>>> to discuss at the meeting.
>>>>
>>>> -James
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>
>


-- 
Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk
Academic IT Services, University of Oxford