[MEI-L] MEI ODD Fridays / Development Schedule for MEI

[Johannes Kepper]

Dear all,

while the ODD Fridays for MEI have gone rather unnoticed in the last couple of months, there was significant progress on the Guidelines. While we still need to focus on editing the Guidelines, the Technical Chairs suggest to follow a slightly different procedure for the continued development of MEI. 

From here on, we would like to hold bi-monthly conference calls with all interested parties. At these calls, we will discuss open pull requests with additions to and revisions of both the MEI Schema and Guidelines. There are two requirements for accepting changes: There have to be matching proposals for both the Schema and the Guidelines (i.e., changes without proper documentation won't get accepted, but may collect feedback), and there needs to be wide acceptance for these changes at the meetings and in the corresponding PRs. If a proposal doesn't match these two criteria, it will be postponed by two months, and should be revised for the next developer meeting. 

We aim to take notes of these meetings and publish them on MEI's GitHub wiki. We also plan to send out timely reminders in advance of these meetings. The intention is to increase both comprehensibility and transparency of the MEI development workflow, and make it more accessible and inviting to newcomers. We will reflect this plan to the MEI website. 

The schedule for these developer workshops is the _last Friday of every odd month_, at 1pm UTC. The next three iterations will thus be:

November 29, 1pm UTC
January 31, 1pm UTC
March 27, 1pm UTC

The following meeting will then be held during / after the Community Meeting at MEC in Boston (i.e. on May 29). There, we will evaluate this workflow. 

We're looking forward to see everyone who's interested on Friday next week. 

All best,
Benni and jo