[tei-council] Electing a TEI Technical Council Chair for next year.

[James Cummings]

Dear TEI Technical Council,

As you know in its desire to become more fully transparent and 
representative body the TEI Consortium has moved to being wholly 
elected and removed the position of institutional 'partners' on 
the TEI Board.  Although I was originally elected to the Council 
for the last year I've been 'Appointed' by the Board and I was 
eager to do away with appointed positions and because the bylaws 
were changing stood for election and was re-elected.

One of the tasks for the incoming TEI Technical Council for 2014 
is to elect itself a chair as per the description at: 
http://www.tei-c.org/About/bylaws.xml#body.1_div.3_div.3 which 
says that:

"The Chair of the Technical Council shall be elected by the 
voting Members of the TEI-C Technical Council from its membership 
and shall serve as the chief technical officer of the Consortium. 
If no Technical Council Member is able or willing to assume the 
chair, the Technical Council may request the Board of Directors 
to second one of its elected members to the role, or it may 
nominate a non-elected individual."

The bylaws are intentionally vague on *how* we do this since they 
wanted to leave it in control of the Council and Board to sort 
themselves out and not be required to use any particular election 
method. I would be interested in Council (new, returning, and 
departing) coming to at least a vague consensus of how they think 
this should take place.

I believe that we should have the election _before_ the end of 
the year so that the new chair can start sorting out things for 
next year, that we want a simple procedure (since we'll be 
repeating this each year). I'm in favour of it being as open as 
possible, but perhaps not until after the last vote is counted 
(since we don't want one person's vote to influence others)?

Things I guess we need to know:
- Who from the new/returning group wishes to stand for election? 
(I can tell them more about what it is like) I'm intending to 
stand but equally don't want to discourage others if they are 
keen to do it.

- Would something like a 'hidden poll' on Doodle be sufficient, 
if the results (should it be who voted for who or just aggregate 
numbers?) were posted publicly on the mailing after? An example 
of one of those might look like 
http://www.doodle.com/a9fqvskmq5mxexqn Would that be good enough?

- We need someone to act as the person to organise things (e.g. 
the poll) and while I'd usually suggest this be the current 
Council Chair I think there is a perceived conflict of interest 
if someone intending to stand does this. (I'd be honest, 
ya'know...of course, but it is about perception ;-) ) This could 
be anyone on Council, but maybe someone from the existing Council 
who is not returning? Or two people... etc.

I'd be interested in anyone's thoughts. If we can come to a vague 
consensus of _how_ you want it to work then I'll put it on the 
TEI-Council-FAQ.

-James

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