Author: Martina Scholger

The Nominations and Elections Committee is pleased to announce the opening of the 2020 TEI-C Elections. Results will be announced at the 2020 Members’ Meeting, which will be held at 11 a.m. Eastern Time (US) on Thursday, November 19. The Zoom url for the meeting will be distributed on November 1.

In 2020, TEI Members will hold an election to fill 5 open positions on the TEI Technical Council (4 for 3-year terms, 1 for a 2-year term) and 3 on the TEI Board of Directors (2 for 3-year terms, 1 for a 2-year term). We are also electing 1 new member to the TAPAS advisory board.

The following persons have been nominated and have agreed to stand as candidates for election to the TEI Technical Council, the TEI Board, and the TAPAS advisory Board. They have all supplied a statement covering two aspects:

1. a candidate statement in which they discuss their reasons for wishing to serve on the Board, TAPAS or Technical Council and what their particular goals would be.
2. a biographical description focusing on their education, training, research, etc., relevant to the TEI.

The link to the full slate and voting information is https://tei-c.org/Vault/MembersMeetings/2020-info/mm79.html

Candidate Statements: TEI Technical Council

• Syd Bauman
• Helena Bermúdez Sabel
• Hugh Cayless
• Nicholas Cole
• Janelle Jenstad
• David Maus
• Ariane Pinche
• Raffaele Viglianti

Candidate Statements: TEI Board of Directors

• Diane Jakacki
• Ken Penner
• Gimena del Rio Riande

Candidate Statements: TAPAS Advisory Board

• Laura Estill

A Note on Voting

Voting will be conducted via the OpaVote website, which uses the open-source balloting software OpenSTV for tabulation. OpenSTV is a widely used open-source Single Transferable Vote program.

TEI Member voters, identified by email address, will receive a URL at which to cast their ballots. Upon closing of the election, all voters who cast a vote will be sent an email with a link to the results of the election, from which it is also possible to download the actual final ballots for verification. Individual members may vote in the TEI Technical Council elections. The nominated representative of institutions with membership may vote for both the TEI Board and TEI Technical Council.

Voting closes on November 16, 2020 at 23:59 Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time (HAST) as it offers the latest global midnight.

The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI-C) invites nominations for election to the TEI-C Board, the Technical Council, and the TAPAS Advisory Board.

The following positions are vacant and up for election:

• 3 on the Board (2 for 3-year terms, 1 for a 2-year term)
• 5 on the Council (4 for 3-year terms, 1 for a 2-year term)
• 1 on the TAPAS Advisory Board (for 3-year term)

Please submit your nominations to the TEI-C Board Nominating Committee by 30 June 2020: Google form.
The elections will take place via online voting prior to the virtual Members’ Meeting in October 2020.

Process

Self-nominations are welcome and common. TEI-C membership is not a requirement to serve on the Board or Council or on the TAPAS Advisory Board. All nominees who choose to accept their nomination will be asked to provide a brief statement of interest and biographical paragraph, and to give notice that, if elected, they will be willing to serve.

Once nominations are received and registered, the named person will be asked for:

• formal acceptance of the nomination by 20 July
• a biography and a statement of interest and purpose by 15 August

All nominees are reminded that it is the duty of members of all three bodies to participate actively in the discussion, activities, and meetings of their respective body.

The TEI-C seeks to represent its community and encourages diversity and gender balance in all its constituencies. It provides a welcoming environment for all.

TEI-C Board

The TEI-C Board is the governing body for the TEI Consortium and is responsible for its strategic and financial oversight. The Board conducts its business by email correspondence, monthly teleconferences, and at its annual meeting, for which travel subsidies are available. For more information on the Board, including a list of current members, please see: https://tei-c.org/about/board-of-directors/. This year two of the TEI Board of Directors vacancies are for 3 years, with another one for 2 years as part of the transition to 3-year terms.

TEI-C Technical Council

The TEI-C Technical Council oversees the technical development of the TEI Guidelines. Candidates for Council should be reasonably experienced users of the Guidelines, and expertise/interest in specific areas is helpful. Council members also evaluate bug reports and feature requests, and they have primary responsibility for editing and updating the Guidelines and its release packages. Prospective candidates should be available for subsidized travel to one or two face-to-face meetings annually, and they should be able to commit to ongoing work during the course of the year. For more information on the Council, including a list of current members, please see: https://tei-c.org/activities/council/. This year four of the TEI Technical Council vacancies are for 3 years, with another one for 2 years as part of the transition to 3-year terms.

TAPAS Advisory Board

The TAPAS Advisory Board contributes to the strategic planning of TAPAS, a TEI publishing and repository service, and the elected members represent the needs and perspective of the TEI community. Advisory Board members work via email correspondence and occasional conference calls and may be asked for advice and assistance with grant planning, collaborative alliances with other organizations, and outreach to the TEI community. Elected members serve a term of three years. For more information about the TAPAS Advisory Board, please see: http://www.tapasproject.org/tapas-team.

On behalf of the Nominating Committee 2020:

• Kathryn Tomasek, TEI-C Board Chair
• Scott Hamlin, TAPAS Co-Director
• Luis Meneses, TEI-C Webmaster
• James Cummings, TEI-C Board member
• Martina Scholger, TEI-C Council Chair

The TEI Consortium seeks nominations for a TEI-C Communications Manager to be appointed by the Board of Directors as a non-voting member of the Board. Suggested start is Monday, November 2 with a minimum of 12 months. The term length is negotiable.

This person will report regularly to the Board in its monthly meetings, will administer the TEI’s website, which runs on WordPress, and will assist with archiving conference websites and other noteworthy content developed outside of the TEI’s web infrastructure, including content maintained in Google Drive and other third party systems. They will run the TEI-C’s social media accounts.

The Communications Manager will be responsible for managing the TEI’s email lists and the password management for the TEI-C’s MediaWiki.

This person will also be responsible for setting up electronic voting using OpaVote for the annual TEI-C Board and Council elections and the TAPAS Advisory Board elections.

The TEI-C web site is currently undergoing a redesign, restructuring the content and introducing multilingualism. The TEI-C Communication Manager will support this attempt, will maintain oversight of the structure of the website, and will support the TEI Board and Council in keeping the information up to date.

The time commitment will range between 2 and 5 hours per week, depending on the tasks at hand.

It is essential that the candidate:
• has experience or aptitude with command-line tools, mailing list administration, and similar technical skills
• has experience with social media
• has experience with WordPress administration
• is well-versed in HTML/CSS
• has strong communication skills

Experience with XML/TEI is advantageous but not required. The Board of Directors will offer financial support to attend the annual TEI conference for the person selected for the position, or to their employer in return for their time commitment.

The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium is committed to diversity and inclusion, and ensures equal opportunity to all qualified individuals. We invite applications from all including those with diverse needs, backgrounds, and abilities.
If you are interested in this position please send your application including a short CV and motivation statement to the Board of Directors (board@tei-c.org). Deadline for applications is Monday, September 28.

The TEI Consortium has released version 4.0.0 of the TEI Guidelines, the “Galileo” release, and version 7.49.0 of the TEI Stylesheets.

For more details, please see the release notes.

The TEI Consortium is pleased to announce this year’s winners of the Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity. Congratulations to John Walsh, Grant Simpson, and Saeed Moaddeli for their excellent work on TEI Boilerplate, a pathbreaker for the publication of XML/TEI on the web.