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

[Martin Holmes]

I think this needs to be an electronic poll, because we can't assume 
we're ever going to be able to all meet in person. I see no objection to 
Doodle, assuming we don't think impersonation would be an issue. Perhaps 
we should all be required to get Doodle logins and make these available 
to the organizer ahead of time, so the poll could be limited to those 
users, rather than the open system we use for meeting times where we 
just fill in our names.

The person to organize it could perhaps be the board representative, who 
is non-voting, so would presumably be the most objective of us. 
Alternatively, the organizer could be the outgoing Chair _except_ when 
that person is standing again, in which case it could be the board rep.

I'm not sure about transparency of voting. With the current Council 
membership I can't imagine any conflict arising, but we should perhaps 
plan on the basis that future Councils might be more contentious than we 
are now, so perhaps who voted for who should be secret.

Cheers,
Martin

On 13-10-29 10:10 AM, James Cummings wrote:
> 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
>

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)