[MEI-L] MEI organization
Benjamin Wolff Bohl
bohl at edirom.de
Wed May 14 14:17:59 CEST 2014
Dear all,
many thanks for the lively discussion! Please excuse my late answer, as
preparations for MusEC2014 keep me quite busy.
BTW: there will be a "_blank" poster on MusEC2014 for developing and
discussing ideas, I'd be happy to meet any of you there ;-)
Sorry this is quite long but splitting into several mails would not have
eased the discussion I guess... feel free to state on single passages.
1.) Reporting System of the Board
@Richard: Thanks for bringing up this very crucial issue.
According to the white paper the Board should have regular meetings
every three months, publish an agenda online prior to the meeting and
minutes in a timely manner afterwards. Is there anything to add to this
for proper transparency? Maybe the publication should not simply be made
somewhere online, but on music-encoding.org and announced via MEI-L!
2.) Electoral Process
@Richard: thanks again!
This indeed is a very important (also concerning all other
organizational decisions), as selecting one or the other electoral
process might have great impact on individual chances. Having a first
deadline for entering nominations seems plausible as otherwise we would
have to rank the whole community :-P As far as I'm concerned I'd welcome
the option of self-nomination, as this gives room for personal
commitment. When a closed list of candidates is available a voting
should take place. Concerning the fact, that anybody on MEI-L would have
the right to vote there should be no minimum voter turnout, as this
could immobilise MEI.
Andrew suggested a ranked ballot voting in a comment in the white paper
and I supported this idea. This is quite similar to Richards suggested
"instant runoff".
Essentially each voter will rank any number of candidates on his ballot,
the one(s) with the fewest first-place-votes will be eliminated, and
their votes will be redistributed according to the respective
second-place-votes on the ballots; this process will be reiterated until
the number of candidates matches the number of places.
For details see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
and: https://opavote.appspot.com/results/100002/0
3.) Bylaws
We should definitely work out proper bylaws. Some time ago Perry
provided me with a nice example from the Forum for Classics, Libraries,
and Scholarly Communication
(http://www.classicslibrarians.org/about/bylaws/). These are quite
compact and could serve as a first starting point for MEI bylaws. MEI
Strategy Development Group may certainly help in drafting these bylaws
but in the end someone will have to accept them / pass them / vote for
them I guess?
4.) Current Council and General Assembly
I think I agree with everything that has been said concerning the
Current Council and the idea of a General Assembly that has been said in
this thread so far. Just to sum up:
- The Current Council remains in place as long as the new organizational
structures have not been implemented!
- After implementing and populating the new Board (e.g. by elections)
the Current Council will be dissolved, as participation of former
Council Members can take place in the General Assembly.
- The General Assembly will be held yearly (be it in connection with a
specific MEI conference or in connection with other potentially
interesting events/conferences, e.g. as pre-conference)
5.) Implementation procedure
As decided last year the Current Council is still in place and we
implemented the "Interim Steering Group" (Group A) with Perry Roland,
Johannes Kepper, and Gabriele Buschmeier (and Kurt Gärtner) to (amongst
others) negotiate the formal collaboration possibilities with the Mainz
Academy. MEI Strategy Development Group (Group B) was to elaborate some
proposals.
If we as community now develop our ideas of a proper form of organizing
ourselves I think:
first: MEI Strategy Group should update the current porposals to match
all the feedback
second: call for another round of feedback while all the above groups
try to elaborate a first draft of bylaws
third: publish first draft of bylaws
fourth: Group A & B call for nominations, conduct elections
fifth: convene the elected members to the Working Group Music Encoding
at the Mainz Academy and dissolve Group A, Group B, and the Current Council
seventh: call for Interest Groups
eighth: MEI as much as you can ;-)
Somewhere in this process the first draft of bylaws might be checked
against national law of different countries?
Bes wishes,
Benjamin
***********************************************************
Musikwissenschaftliches Seminar Detmold/Paderborn
BMBF-Projekt "Freischütz Digital"
Benjamin Wolff Bohl
Gartenstraße 20
D--32756 Detmold
Tel. +49 (0) 5231 / 975-669
Fax: +49 (0) 5231 / 975-668
E-Mail: bohl at edirom.de
http://www.freischuetz-digital.de
***********************************************************
Am 09.05.2014 15:16, schrieb Richard Freedman:
> I've looked over the various models proposed on the share document. I
> think that the "A" model looks to be the most likely to succeed. The
> Board cannot be too large (as others have noted), or it will not be
> nimble enough to act upon recommendations that emerge from the various
> Interest Groups and other ways we have of expressing our views on the
> project.
>
> Two things that are still unclear to me:
>
> 1. What reporting system to we imagine from the Board to the
> membership at large? We note that Interest Groups ought to send their
> own reports and suggestions to the Board in advance of meetings. What
> system will we have in place for the Board to offer public reactions
> to these proposals, or otherwise maintain an archive of near- and
> long-term projects or policies?
>
> 2. How will we in practice elect the at large Board members? By some
> process of nomination, followed by elections? In my experience,
> groups need some process of assembling a relatively small list of
> candidates from who to choose (assuming we want some sort of
> majority-wins voting). For example: we have a first round of
> nominations in search of 3 or 4 candidates for each position to be
> filled. Then we hold instant-run-off elections to select the winners
> from this short list. (Perhaps this is too early for such detail, but
> it's worth thinking ahead to what the process might look like, since
> achieving the sorts of representation we eventually decide upon will
> in turn depend upon having the right process through which candidates
> are proposed and elected.)
>
> Richard
>
> how would we conduct these elections in the case of the at large
> membership of the board?
>
>
> On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 3:27 PM, Giuliano Di Bacco
> <gdibacco at indiana.edu <mailto:gdibacco at indiana.edu>> wrote:
>
>
> Also from my personal perspective:
> 1- I always assumed that the current Council would remain in place
> until the future Board is installed;
> 2- the conference is approaching, and I see this as a precious
> opportunity for both informal and formal discussion. So (at this
> point) I would wait until the end of it to draw any conclusion.
> Then the proposals could be fine-tuned and re-submitted for final
> discussion and approval to the list. As for Benjamin's excellent
> idea, we could attach a resumé of all pros/cons that people will
> have expressed so far (I am sure that those members of the
> Strat-group who will be in Charlottesville would be happy to
> collect more opinions--certainly I would).
> Best,
> Giuliano
>
>
> Benjamin Wolff Bohl wrote on 08/05/2014 11:01:
>> Dear Johannes,
>> thanks for your questions, tah I'll answer below from my personal
>> perspective:
>>
>> Am 06.05.2014 21:18, schrieb Johannes Kepper:
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> thanks to those that did respond to the strategy group's proposals. For those who didn't -- it's not too late, please give some feedback and help us to shape the future MEI. You can find the document with the proposals at
>>>
>>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IBvbKFM1fo4lwyFnIYnneUhfwTj4DLrAmtCSUfqzeQs/edit?usp=sharing
>>>
>>> Since we're approaching the conference, I'd like to ask some questions.
>>>
>>> - All proposals don't make a statement about the current MEI Council. Was this an intentional decision? If I remember correctly, there was some concern about this group last year. I know that it won't be easy to find a solution for this one, but I think we should address it in one way or the other...
>>
>> This is a great hint, I guess we just missed to articulate
>> anything about this. From my part I always was assuming, that any
>> new Board would replace the "current Council" but others might
>> have another opinion?!
>>
>>> - At first glance, it seems that the first proposal triggered most feedback. Would it be a correct observation that most in the community prefer this over the other two _in principle_, but still would like to clarify some details about it? Please don't get me wrong -- I don't want to get rid of the other two proposals, I just want to get a sense of where we are drifting. If you think my impression is wrong (which is perfectly possible), please disagree -- either here on MEI-L or in the document linked above. If you like the other proposals (or aspects of them), please speak up -- the sooner the better. Please remember that the google document gives the possibility of anonymous feedback, if you prefer.
>>
>> Getting a feeling if general tendencies towards one of the
>> proposals would be indeed very interesting! Nevertheless the
>> comment frequency is not to be taken as general tendency towards
>> one or the other... for example Raffaele shared a quite good
>> argument for Model B over this list:
>>
>>> In general, I prefer Model B: it's lean and reflects well the
>>> size of the community. It also keeps the focus on the Guidelines
>>> and releases, which I agree with Sigfrid are the most important
>>> product of this community. I feel model B will allows us to move
>>> forward without having to jump through too many administrative
>>> hoops, while tasking people with essential admin responsibilities.
>>
>> Maybe we should try come up with a general pros-and-cons list for
>> each Model?
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Benjamin
>>
>>> Thanks again for your interest and participation.
>>> Best,
>>> Johannes
>>>
>>>
>
>
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>
> --
> Richard Freedman
> John C. Whitehead Professor of Music
> Haverford College
> Haverford, PA 19041
>
> 610-896-1007
> 610-896-4902 (fax)
>
> http://www.haverford.edu/faculty/rfreedma
>
>
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