Present: Andrew Hankinson, Ichiro Fujinaga, Johannes Kepper, Laurent Pugin, Perry Roland, Benjamin W. Bohl Absent: Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Kristina Richts, Norbert Dubowy
This year’s face-to-face meeting of the MEI Board took place during the Music Encoding Conference at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. The below topics were discussed.
Publishing the past proceedings is a great desideratum, as this also can have positive impact on visibility and community building. The deadline for submitting to the proceedings of MEC2018 was set to end of August 2018.
As the 2017 elections were a bit late, the following dates were set for the 2018 elections:
Unfortunately UVA has decided to cut down their support of MEI. The major impact of this is that Perry Roland will no longer be able to dedicate work time to the cause of MEI. The MEI Board highly regrets this decision.
After the successful developer workshop in October 2017 there should be another developer meeting in late fall of 2018.
The development status of MEI 4.0 has proceeded to good terms. The last major issue is revising the neumes module.
The call for hosting MEC2020 was sent out on March 12 with August 1 as application deadline. A special emphasis should be to encourage nort american institutions to apply as hosts.
The MEI Board has realised several issues concerning the MEI community. A major issue is the roaring silence on the MEI-L mailinglist. Reasons for this might include but are not limited to moving code development to GitHub. Obviously many discussions take place in the issues section available there. Nevertheless effort should be put into reviving the mailinglist as GitHub to some degree is a developer platform that might threaten away participation by others.
Moreover the MEI Board would like to develop community growth strategies that might include things as:
Another issue was whether MEI should better be organized in some legal form. As experience with international non-profit 501c (US) or internationale gemmeinnützige Vereine (Germany) is scarce among the Board this has to be postponed but possibilities should be investigated.
Due to the issues of community building and legal organization of MEI the topic of potential membership fees for MEI was brought up. Money gained could e.g. be used for bursaries and travel funding. Moreover it could help to get a more defined membership. Alternatives could be things as personal sponsorship, a donation on conference registration, etc. Nevertheless this might be easier with “a proper” legal organization form for MEI, as e.g. a 501c organization could accept regular donations and hand out receipts for them.
Nevertheless the MEI Board considers it problematic as this could result in defining an “in-group” and an “out-group” in the current community.