Report on the TEI Consortium Consultation About Membership

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21669563

At the beginning of 2026, the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI-C) investigated its community’s feelings concerning its core activities and financial situation. The results encourage the TEI-C to continue its core activities of development and maintenance of the TEI-C's Guidelines, maintenance of the necessary technical infrastructure, the TEI-C annual conference, and the jTEI journal. Respondents felt negatively towards social media such as ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) and Facebook compared to the TEI-L mailing list and Bluesky accounts. The TEI-C is encouraged to promote the TEI-C Community Calls and the TEI-C Slack workspace.

Given current costs, the responses support increasing the individual membership rate to $100 USD, while continuing to allow those who cannot afford it to provide a lower donation for membership. The responses indicate that projects and institutions should get a 10% financial discount or 10% more members as an incentive to join. Many members (or former members) are unaware of the existing benefits, so these should be advertised more. New incentives, such as purchasing multi-year memberships, mentorship programmes, and forms of recognition should be considered. Targeted membership drives including web banners (and footers), ‘We are TEI’ blog posts, and direct outreach to TEI projects, were encouraged. The writing of Letters of Support for academic funding bids should be highlighted as a benefit for those including membership in their proposals.

In general the survey provided acknowledgement that the costs for TEI-C infrastructure and work has increased and other useful feedback. Although TEI-C may be able to reduce some costs, the focus should be on getting new members and other funding sources.

The TEI-C Board of Directors will consider this feedback from the TEI-C community as it moves forwards with policy decisions to ensure the future health of the TEI-C. The report can be found at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21669563.