TEI Board and Council Joint Meeting: 12 December 2025

Agenda Items

  • P6

    • will take about a decade to roll out. Will aim to deliver a presentation about P6 at the 2026 TEI conference.
    • Some of P5’s problems can only be fixed by reimagining -- finally there are the technical means to solve some of the problems or expand P5s hard limits
    • Will continue in XML, but with new architecture to permit new features that the TEI can't currenly accomodate
    • Council will need to bring in guests (from working groups, other expertise)

  • Grants for P6

    • Councils F2F meetings are a priority to the board. The in-kind of council members expertise and work are invaluable to the TEI
    • Writing future grant funding to seek support for an extra F2F meeting, retreat style: COST Action (requires a pre-meeting)? Connections Grant (Canada)? to support time to think through P6 planning, to develop the theoretical basis for the change
    • Discussion: Council should try to move things forward by indicating what we need (e.g. 3 working groups and an in-person meeting over next three years.)
    • Lite Working Group: with a pilot project in the direction of P6
      • Had a 3-day meeting, with a first prototype of context-aware content models.
      • The meetings, as a trial, did show that there is room to revise the class system to enable the kind of encoding needed
      • Lite could lead the charge on early grants as it is already thinking towards P6

  • TEI Technical Council Technical Contributors Initiative

    • There is some interest in expanding the size of Technical Council, but we recognize that this isn’t feasible nor necessarily a good idea
    • But there are many people, as evidenced by the elections, who would like to be part of TEI Council. So how do we encourage these people to contribute and recognize their desire to take a more active role within the TEI Council?
    • One proposal: Council would offer training for all interested in gaining skills for working on maintaining and developing the Guidelines with Council.
    • Mentees in this initiative would gain the honorary designation of "TEI Technical Contributor" when they resolve two tickets or pull requests for Council approval.
    • They can then feature this certification when they run for Council and in other ways as an honorific.
    • To begin this program: We offer everyone on the Council election slate (not just the winners) to become our first mentoring cohort. These are the people we invite for training to attain the new badge of TEI Technical Contributor.
    • Training should be openly available, public facing
    • The mentoring load will have to be kept manageable It would be best to graft it into the mentoring that happens on Council (which will need to be formalized a bit more)
    • Sustainability is a concern, does this mentoring eventually become available to the wider community as a whole and how feasible would it be to offer this to the wider community.
    • ALA’s Kaleidoscope program might be a good mentorship model
    • Pitch: a pilot with the those who stood for Council this year, although the program might be too basic for some of these folks
    • The time commitment is real -- at the moment, even a single ticket takes 2 hours
    • Keep the cohort small -- 4-8 zoom calls. More of a training workshop than a mentorship
    • Joey Takeda and Elisa Besharo-Bondar volunteer to take this on

  • Membership Drive

    • Membership drive with a “We are the TEI” theme
    • Institutional funding is uncertain.
    • What are the benefits of membership that we could highlight for the membership drive?
    • Need to increase membership rates but there’s a 10% discount for membership for December

  • TEI By Example

    • Eli Bleeker is taking on thinking through TEI By Example
    • Should keep its current instutuional home

  • 2026 Conference

    • Joey Takeda is writing a Canadian SSHRC Connection grant to help fund the conference. The University of Victoria is providing the cash and in-kind match that the grant requires.

  • AOB:

    • Meeting with DARIAH went well. While the TEI is not necessarily a good fit as a DARIAH SIG or a country, there may be ways to benefit each other, including offering future iterations of the TEI Technical Contributor program.
    • Ontologies …
      • Diane is working with folks who may be game to take on the Ontologies SIG. There is broad interest in the community
      • The AI SIG propposal group will be interested in this work (e.g. for responsible RAG augmentation)
      • Diane has been doing outreach to CIDOC-CRM