TEI Members Meeting 2010: Business Meeting Agenda

TEI-C Members's Business Meeting 2010
Date: Thursday 18 November 2010, 1600-1800 CET
Place: Aula, University of Zadar

Minutes taken by Sarah Wells

Certification of Meeting

The meeting was certified at 16:08.

Appointment of recording secretary

Sarah Wells was appointed as the Recording Secretary.

Approval of agenda

The agenda was approved.

Approval of last year's minutes

The minutes from last year’s meeting were approved.

Remuneration

None of officers has received remuneration in the last year.

Election results

The election results were announced. The following people were elected to the TEI Board:

• Lou Burnard
• Arianna Ciula

The following people were elected to the TEI Council:

• Piotr Bański
• James Cummings
• Sebastian Rahtz
• Stuart Yeates

Approval of Auditor and Fee

The auditor and fee were approved.

Chair's report

This is Daniel O’Donnell’s last year as Chair, although he will remain in office until the next chair has been found. The meeting attendees expressed their gratitude for his efforts.

Over the past four years, the Members’ meeting has been a conference, not just a meeting, requiring larger organizational committee and support from outside TEI committee. In consequence, it has required greater organization and effort by the both the local organizing committee and the conference committee. The organizers of the Zadar meeting have done very well, and a round of thanks was made for their efforts.

It’s been an active year corporately, getting AccessTEI up and negotiating contract w/Apex. A major revamp of the web site has just been posted. We need to figure out how to advertise it and keep it moving without regular updates.

A committee met over the summer to discuss the hosts – what they do, why they exist, and their relationship with the TEI. The proposed changes in bylaws came out from that committee. The proposed bylaw changes will widen the relationship of hosts to TEI and create a larger Board. If the changes pass, we’ll need special elections by end of year to fill places.

The committee also recommended that the Host RFPs should change. The process will change and relationship with TEI will change. The Board will update the Host RFP. We want places where TEI is actively used. We currently have five hosts, four of which are at the end of their terms. Two of hosts also have elected members on the board.

The nature of hosts had previously provided two different types of services, in-kind and paid. Paid services were administrative, editorial, member services. In the new arrangements, we may not ask hosts to contribute in-kind services or at least not things that can be outsourced. In-kind contributions would remain and would need to be minimum of $5,000. However, payments back to hosts may change, as the hosts may be delivering different services or choose to outsource some tasks.

TEI needs new types of specialized services, such as education outreach and special skills that active members are doing anyway but could do from leadership position. New hosts have to be division 0 members, but the sliding economic scale that is used to set membership fees allows hosts from poorer countries. We need to update the host RFP to reflect the new needs, but it may not get done before the next round.

Treasurer's Report

Sarah Wells has posted two reports, for the entirety of 2009 and 2010 up to November 1. In 2009, total expenses were approximately $117,000 and total income was approximately $111,000, leaving a negative balance of about -$6,000. This is problematic, but it is not the first year that TEI has reported a total negative balance. Thanks to careful management by previous TEI treasurers, TEI has always maintained a reserve, so at no point was there a danger of going into the red.

Last year, TEI started allowing payment for individual subscriptions and conference registration by credit card. This has proved successful, although it does cost us: the credit card companies charge small fees on each transaction. But, the convenience of accepting credit card payments is worth the cost.

The 2009 costs included the usual overhead costs for membership, administration, and editorial management. Costs were slightly lower than in 2008 — $38,500 vs. $40,000 — but this is not representative of the actual time and effort provided as in-kind effort by the host institutions. Other routine expenses include insurance, tax compliance services, attorney fees, bank charges, charges, travel for Board and Council meetings, and emissary travel for those who represent TEI at important conferences and meetings.

Income from membership and subscription fees so far is lower than in 2009. This is partly due to economic causes, since many institutions have cut back on spending, and partly because several individual projects have concluded and therefore cancelled their memberships. The decline is part of a trend over the past few years. The Board had projected lower income in 2010, based on this trend, but the drop has been less than expected, which is good news.

There were questions about expenses incurred in 2008 and 2009 and paid in 2009 and 2010, so the Treasurer was asked to generate a more in-depth financial report for 2009 and 2010 to date showing differences between actual numbers and when incurred. There was also interest in seeing comparisons of total costs from Board and Council meetings over the past few years.

Council Report

The Council has worked to concentrate communications between community at large and the Council. We are using the TEI list and Source Forge to generate queries from community and keep track of what is being discussed and dealing w/community tickets and queries. The editorial support budget is used to answer and respond to community queries

Last year the Council had one face-to-face meeting to talk about making the TEI infrastructure more coherent. It discussed developing coherent behaviors for coherent semantics and integrating mechanisms for better coverage of document types (such as manuscript transcription work). It also has worked to make tools for managing customization more coherent (e.g., collaboration between TEI Tite, Council, and Apex).

Many little steps have been taken to implement this, in SourceForge, Roma, and in invisible changes (such as ODD), so as to preserve coherence across endeavors. This is difficult to carry off with only one meeting per year where the Council can be in the same room and have the chance to discuss issues with users.

TEI is gaining official status in the internet with the upcoming IETF/IANA registration of the ‘application/tei+xml’ media type for markup languages defined in accordance with the Text Encoding and Interchange guidelines. This action was coordinated by Sigfrid Lundberg. The individual submission is under review by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), and the next step is publication, which may occur this November.

Full text of the registration and draft can be found at http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-lundberg-app-tei-xml-07.txt and http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-lundberg-app-tei-xml/.

There is movement towards a joint project between TEI and ISO, involving wider use of ODD in ISO/TC 37/SC 3 (TMF) and SC 4 (MLIF, MAF, TimeML, FSR, FSD).

The next Council meeting will be in the Midwestern U.S., and it will cover evaluation of ODD (explicit modularity), closer work with ISO, and new TEI host configurations (impact on editorial support and tool maintenance strategy).

Host Activities Report

The reports are not all are up yet but will be posted soon.

Bylaw amendments: discussion and vote

The proposed bylaw amendment (http://www.tei-c.org/News/#tei-2010-10-08-major_changes_in_consortium_governance_proposals_for_changes_to_bylaws) was brought up for discussion. There were no comments, so there was a movement to bring the changes to a vote.

A quorum of twenty-eight votes by members was required, but only eighteen had been cast before the meeting. An additional six were made during the meeting, bring a total of twenty-four votes. Since all votes have been in favor of the changes, the Board will vote on it during the weekend Board meeting. Assuming that the Board passes it, special elections will need to be held to add in two new members. From now on, we’ll probably be voting in four new members each year, instead of two.

Place and date of next year’s conference

There was discussion about the location for next year’s conference. Traditionally the locations have alternated between North America and Europe and have been in opposition to the DH conference locations. Since the 2011 DH will be in North America, the 2011 TEI Members’ Meeting should be outside North America.

There was some discussion of the time and location for the next Members’ Meeting. It would be good to have it in a major city that is easily and economically accessible for North American members. The timing is always awkward, since it falls towards the end of the fall terms, but there is no single good time.

Upcoming activities/opportunities

Adjournment

The meeting adjourned at 17:44.