Agenda for May 6, 2015 ALTO board teleconference.

  1. Review action items [Frederick leads discussion]
  2. Announce location for ALTO board face-to-face meeting [Frederick leads discussion]
  3. Discuss board membership and recruiting new members. [Frederick leads discussion]
  4. Discuss PBworks migration, Github use, and shared storage for large files. Review organization and use of Github for the benefit of infrequent attenders. [Frederick leads discussion]
  5. Continue discussion of Glyphs change request (issue 26). (See item 10 in minutes from London face-to-face meeting) [Joachim leads discussion.]
  6. Continue discussion of Shape change request (issue 22). (See item 10 in minutes from London face-to-face meeting) [Evelien and Jean Philippe lead discussion.]

View all open action items here.

Attending members

Minutes

wrt action items 5 and 12. Evelien remarked that PBworks sent her an email threatening to delete the ALTO repository for lack of activity. Frederick reviewed the options PBWorks offers for downloading stuff from a repository; it's possible to download everything to a .zip file but the repository would have to be upgraded (only the Classroom and Campus editions offer full exports). An upgrade costs $99/year.

The organizers of both DLF 2015 and iPRES 2015 would welcome a meeting of the ALTO editorial board. DLF 2015 is Oct 26-28 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; iPRES 2015 is Nov 2-6 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina USA. The METS board has not yet decided where it will have a face-to-face meeting, but it is leaning toward iPRES 2015.

Frederick reports that Markus Enders resigned from the board because he has taken a new position at University College London. Best wishes Markus.

Eric Weig from University of Kentucky Digital Libraries has nominated himself for ALTO board membership. Everyone attending the meeting agrees that Eric would be a good board member.

Board members discussed board membership generally: How many board members should the ALTO board have (METS has 15, PREMIS has 10)? Currently there is no fixed term for board members. Should the term be set at 2 or 3 or ... years? How many board members are necessary to make a decision? These issues and perhaps others have not been urgent, but a policy wrt to membership terms, quorums, chair term, etc would be good to have. Both administrative and technical issues should have a voting quorum. Jukka suggested that voting on issues should be done off-line because it often happens that there is not a quorum at the web meeting. The consensus of the attending board members is that 3 year membership terms are good. Brian suggests that the terms be staggered so that the term of 1/3 of the board members comes up for renewal each year. Jukka will draft a proposal for discussion of board member terms and voting quorum at the next board meeting (cf. action item 17).

Recruiting new board members was the next topic of discussion. No attending member had objections to recruiting a board member from commerical companies. Brian suggested someone from Northern Micrographics or from iArchives / Ancestry. Brian will contact someone from Northern Micrographics about board membership; Frederick will contact someone from iArchives / Ancestry about board membership.

Frederick explains that the Webex recordings from each meeting have been uploaded to the shared Google drive. He did this because much of the recent technical discussions have used graphics and screen shares; this is difficult to capture in text minutes. Evelien suggests that a written text summary of the discussions around an issue will make understanding the issue far easier. Frederick asks if the board also needs to summarize the reasons for making a decision wrt an issue. We agree that a text summary, written by the issue's champion, would be far better than the Webex recording for subsequent review. This also distributes the task of writing the meeting minutes.

Jukka suggests that discussions about an issue be recorded as comments to the issue itself and that the minutes contain only a reference to the comment. Everyone concurred.

Off-line Jean Philippe suggested a separate repository for language. Board members attending the meeting did not favor a separate repository since language comments and discussion will be a grey area, that is, to which repository does a comment or an issue belong.

The remainder of the meeting was a discussion of the shape change request (issue 22). Evelien wrote a summary of the shape change request and text directions issues discussions from this and previous meetings.