Agenda for June 3, 2015 ALTO board teleconference.

  1. Review action items [Frederick leads discussion]
  2. Re-announce location for ALTO board face-to-face meeting for board members who haven't been at the last meetings [Frederick leads discussion]
  3. Discuss board membership terms and criteria and recruiting new members. [Jukka and Frederick lead discussion]
  4. Review 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. Merge issues 12, 18, and 22? These issues have overlapping elements inspired by our discussions of item 22. [All.]
  6. Continue discussion of Shape change request (issue 22). (See Evelien's summary of discussion so far.) [Evelien and Jean Philippe lead discussion.]
  7. Continue discussion of Glyphs change request (issue 26). (See item 10 in minutes from London face-to-face meeting) [Joachim leads discussion.]

View all open action items here.

Attending members

Minutes

Eric Weig joins the ALTO board as an official member with this meeting. Frederick will ask Nate to add Eric Weig to the Library of Congress ALTO webpages.

Frederick mentions again transferring ALTO history from PBworks to Github. It costs $99 to download everything from PBworks. No one has used PBworks for ALTO board business recently, not even to look at it.

As far as decisions that the board makes, a quorum is 2/3 of board members must agree (vote "for") an issue, or, given the current number of members, 6 of 9 board members must agree (vote "for") to issue. Most board members agree that a simple majority of board is too simple and that complete agreement (everyone votes "for") is too hard. Jukka mentions that libraries may have wishes for ALTO that vendors do not want. Joachim (the sole board member from a vendor at the moment) does not see this as a problem.

Discussion of decision making process whether administrative or technical. Jukka had suggested some means (email?) of voting off-line. Frederick observes that it has been difficult to get board members to respond to Doodle polls. Jukka suggests uses issue commenting for voting: Each member adds a comment voting "for" or "against" the issue. Jukka proposes a new stage for each issue, "voting". Someone (the chair?) changes the label on an issue from "discussion" to "voting" and for some period of time, board members can vote "for" or "against" the proposed change.

Jukka suggests that an alternative would be to branch the schema. The proposed change would be incorporated into a schema branch. Comments would be made on the branch. When discussion has finished, the chair changes the state of the proposed schema change from "discussion" to "voting" for some period of time. If a quorum (majority) of board members agrees to the change, the proposal schema change is merged into the master branch.

Jukka also suggests that after a change request has been accepted by a quorum of the board that there can be a period of time before the schema change is actually implemented.

Everyone agrees that 3 years is a good term length for board members. The terms should be staggered with 1/3 of the members incumbent each year. Jukka, Joachim, and Evelien are the "oldest" board members at present.

[Action item] Jukka will draft a document describing a quorum, voting, and length of board membership.

Frederick remarks that Evelien's summary of issue 22 was very helpful in writing the minutes. In future each champion will summarize the discussion about the issue and add the summary as a comment to the issue. The chair / secretary for the board will incorporate these summaries in the minutes of the meeting.

Frederick proposed that issues 12, 18, and 22 be merged. Evelien objects, saying that issue 22 should be separate and that the schema change proposed by Jukka is acceptable.

Evelien's summary of the discussion about issue 22 is found here, here, here, and here. Evelien says that ALTO documentation is not clear about what "rotation" means whether the text block or a text line is rotated. Joachim remarks that rotation is applied to block type or a composed block. Evelien says it is not clear if "rotation" applies to the block, the text in the block, or an illustration. Is the rotation inherited to all sub-elements of a block? Joachim says rotation should apply to sub-elements, that is, if a text block is rotated then all text in the block is likewise rotated.

[Action item] Evelien will use the examples in the aforementioned comments and propose a change to ALTO schema (already done) and docummentation. Following this the board will vote on the change using the new voting procedure.

Evelien suggests transferring the comments that she and Jean Philippe made wrt issue 22 to issue 12.