Wednesday 2017-05-17, 7:30 pm to 21:30 pm
Present: Johannes Kepper, Perry Roland, Ichiro Fujinaga, Andrew Hankinson, Laurent Pugin, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Benjamin W. Bohl Absent: Kristina Richts, Giuliano Di Bacco
Minutes: Benjamin W. Bohl, Johannes Kepper, Eleanor Selfridge-Field
The current balance of MEI’s account at the Mainz Academy is ca. €8000.
The Board examined the last election and decided to streamline the procedure next time. Most important, we decided that the new Board shall meet (virtually) on Monday, 2018-01-15. The elections themselves shall be held in the last two weeks of November 2017, with a four-week nomination phase prior to that. An election manager hasn’t been determined (yet). The Board wants to encourage female members of the community to stand for election.
The Board decided against appointing an official treasurer, as a dual control of our finances is ensured through the Academy already.
In order to improve communication about Board matters to the wider community, a member of the Board will take the responsibility to (1) announce Board meetings well in advance, (2) take minutes during the meeting, and (3) make those minutes available to the community in a timely manner. Benjamin W. Bohl will take this role.
As he did in the past, Andrew will serve as interface between the Twitter group and the MEI Board.
Johannes will continue to serve as Administrative Chair of the Board. While Perry will continue to serve as Technical Co-Chair, Andrew will take over from Laurent and will also serve as Technical Co-Chair.
The call for hosting shall be published in February 2018, with a submission deadline of April 15. The Board will take a decision and inform candidates by the end of April 2018, so that the successful venue can prepare slides which will be presented at the Community meeting during MEC2018.
The Board discussed different models for setting up the MEC proceedings. As Perry and Johannes will serve as editors for all three pending years (2015, 2016, 2017), the Board supports them in selecting a workflow most convenient to them. Authors having difficulties with that workflow will be given as much assistance as necessary. The workflow is documented at http://music-encoding.org/proceedings. For future MECs, authors shall be required to submit their camera-ready papers at or shortly after the conference, in order to ensure a fast publication of the proceedings.
While the overall quality of submissions to recent Music Encoding Conferences has been good, members of the Program Committees report that it is sometimes hard to evaluate submissions on the basis of abstracts, which are often rather short. The Board discussed several options including making a distinction between long and short papers, but decided to stick to the current procedure with these important clarifications: (1) The use of ConfTool shall be required for all future conferences. (2) (At least) one member of the Board shall serve in the Program Committee. (3) Abstracts should be required to be 1500 to 2500 words (not counting bibliographic references), and should always provide an overview of the relevant literature in order to be accepted. (4) Workshops should be scheduled and coordinated by the Board.
While the current setup of the final conference day works for some, it’s open structure doesn’t seem to work for the wider community. The structure should be reconsidered for upcoming MECs. One proposal is to offer coordinated time slots for Interest Groups. More details will need to be discussed with the organisers of the next conference.
While the Board has used the term “Music Encoding Conference” (MEC) since the beginning, the conference is sometimes referred to as the “MEI Conference”. We stress that the conference is intentionally open to other encoding schemes and formats and that we invite participation from other music encoding communities, despite the fact that it’s organised by the MEI Community. In order to avoid such mislabelling in the future, we intend to come up with a common logo or wordmark, which then has to be used by local organizers on all posters and other advertising materials for upcoming conferences.
Looking for a final name for the “stripped-down” version of MEI that has been discussed under the working title of “MEI Go!” in the past, the community was asked in a doodle poll about their preferred names. This poll resulted in two favourites, “MEI Core” and “MEI Basic”. While “MEI Core” received slightly better feedback, the Board believes that this label is slightly misleading: The stripped-down version of MEI is not at the core of MEI, but instead leaves out everything that distinguishes MEI from other encoding schemes. The Board therefore decides to use “MEI Basic” as label for this version of MEI.