[MEI-L] Report from the Community Meeting at MEC2018

[Johannes Kepper]

Dear Members of the MEI,

for those of you who weren't able to join us, here's a report from last week's Community Meeting. First of all, we had a wonderful Music Encoding Conference over in College Park, with an exciting program and good organisation – thanks again to Karen, Raffaele, Stephen and their respective teams.

MEC2019 will be hosted by a team led by Robert Klugseder (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and Franz Kelnreiter (Mozarteum Salzburg), and will be held from May 29 to June 1 in wonderful Vienna. We're excited that Kevin Page (Oxford) will serve as Program Chair.

We encouraged institutions to respond to our Call for Hosting MEC2020, which is open until August 1. While we've been able to alternate between Europe and North America so far, that's not a strict requirement. However, we'd be happy to strengthen our North American Community by having another conference there in 2020. Interested parties are invited to reach out to Raff Viglianti or the MEI Board to discuss possible proposals upfront.

As in previous years, MEI has three Institutional Members: ZenMEM (2500€ / year), the ÖAW (500€ / year) and TiDo (500$ / year). With their support, we've been able to sponsor student bursaries at Music Encoding Conferences.

For version 4.0 of the MEI Schema, we're waiting for some last-minute changes from one of our Interest Groups. The current plan is to have these ready by July 1, and to release the new version shortly thereafter. As Perry may not use his official working time for MEI anymore, the MEI Board would like to initiate annual developer meetings in fall. These meetings will have a specific topic, and are open to anyone who wants to actively contribute work to that topic. Sending delegates to these workshops will be accepted as in-kind contribution, which means that such institutions will be treated as Institutional Members of MEI (for that year) and will get their logo on the MEI website. Our Technical Chairs will announce a date and topic for such a workshop in the next few weeks; interested people are requested to respond to that. If your institution may not be able to support you with travel money, please contact the Technical Chairs anyway. While there is no formal procedure for this ready yet, the Board is willing to step in and support such cases with MEI money.

The proceedings for MEC2015 and 2016 will be bundled together and will go out for final author corrections very soon. Proceedings for MEC2017 will be combined with this year's submissions. There will be a separate announcement to this year's authors in the coming week, but basically the same rules as for the last years apply: Please submit either a simple Word file, or try to follow the guidelines given at https://github.com/music-encoding/mec-proceedings. Deadline for submissions will be August 31. We hope to get both volumes – MEC2015+16 and MEC2017+18 – out by the end of the year.

During the Community meeting, we intensively discussed ways on how to improve communication on MEI-L and elsewhere. This also involved discussions about (paid) memberships. It seems like MEI has changed over the last couple of years, and we may have to respond to these changes accordingly. A very simple suggestion is to make sure that all the tools developed should be listed at http://music-encoding.org/resources/tools.html, while all projects using MEI should be listed at http://music-encoding.org/community/projects-users.html. Both pages can be modified through Github (please submit pull requests). If you need assistance, our Technical Team will happily support you. However, it is your responsibility to speak up and get your activities listed there. Regarding the major issues of improving communication / reorganising MEI, we plan to set up a dedicated working group in the coming weeks. There will be a separate mail for that, but if you already know that you'd like to participate in that effort, please contact me off-list.

There will be no separate minutes from the Board meeting at MEC2018, as we've mostly prepared the topics discussed at the Community Meeting.

If there are questions, additions, suggestions etc., please comment.

With best regards,
jo

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