This document describes the procedures by which technical work is planned, assigned to work groups, reviewed, and incorporated into the TEI Guidelines or other TEI documentation. It also describes in passing the constitution of various TEI committees and their terms of service; for fuller information on this, see document TEI ED W52. In cases of conflict, TEI ED W52 supersedes this document and is binding.
1. The Executive Committee of the Text Encoding Initiative delegates authority for the final determination of the technical content of the TEI Guidelines to a Technical Review Committee, which shall be composed of:
2. The chair and the secretary of the Technical Review Committee are appointed by the Executive Committee, in consultation with the Technical Committee.
3. The Technical Review Committee shall meet at least once per calendar year; when possible this meeting will occur immediately before, during, or after the annual conference of one or the other of the sponsoring organizations.
4. A quorum of the Technical Review Committee shall consist of one-half of its members, except that for purposes of establishing a quorum members of the Executive Committee shall not be counted.
5. Public notice shall be given at least three months in advance of any meeting of the Technical Review Committee. Members of TEI work groups, representatives of projects or organizations formally affiliated with the TEI, and representatives of current funding organizations may attend meetings of the Technical Committee, and with the permission of the chair of the committee they may participate in the discussions. The public notice of the meeting shall include the projected agenda, and shall give the name of an individual who may be contacted for further information.
6. Guidelines for specific aspects of text encoding shall be drafted by specialist work groups, constituted as described elsewhere in this document. Work group heads are named for one year renewable terms by the Executive Committee, with the advice of the Technical Review Committee; work group members are named by the work group head, subject to constraints imposed by the Executive and Technical Review Committees.
7. Editors named by the Steering Committee of the TEI shall determine the editorial form and ensure the stylistic coherence of the TEI Guidelines.
8. The TEI Technical Review Committee and editors shall jointly coordinate the work of the work groups.
9. The work groups, the Technical Review Committee, and the editors shall jointly ensure the intellectual consistency and coherence of the Guidelines.
10. Technical work to be performed by or for the Text Encoding Initiative is listed in `work items', which are short descriptions, a paragraph or so in length, of the work to be performed. The TEI's procedures for governing its technical work can be defined as rules for the formulation, proposal, adoption, assignment, cancellation, and resolution of work items and the documents which embody the results of the work they describe.
11. Proposals for new work items may be submitted by anyone, whether or not a participant in the TEI, to the Technical Review Committee or to the editors. New Work Items may involve technical work of any description, but will most commonly involve:
12. At its periodic meetings, the Technical Review Committee shall consider proposals for New Work Items; if approved, work items shall be assigned to an appropriate existing work group, if one exists. If no appropriate work group exists, the Technical Review Committee may recommend to the Executive Committee that a new work group be formed to discharge the work in question. The Executive Committee may agree and form the work group, or decline to form the work group, in which case the new work items is null and void.
13. At its periodic meetings, the Technical Review Committee shall consider technical questions referred to it by work groups, or posed by members of the committee itself. On such questions, the committee may make binding or non-binding recommendations to TEI work groups; it may refer the questions to a subcommittee; or it may refer the questions to a new or existing work group.
14. At its periodic meetings, the Technical Review Committee shall hear reports from the heads of active work groups regarding progress on the work items with which they have been charged. Each work item shall be classed as resolved (if the document addressing it is adopted, and no further work is necessary), continuing (if further work is to be done), or canceled (otherwise). At the end of a meeting, a complete list of Current Work Items shall be prepared by the secretary of the Technical Review Committee and made available publicly.
15. Work groups shall be formed as described above whenever necessary to handle work items approved by the Technical Review Committee; when a work group has discharged all its outstanding work items, or ceased to make satisfactory progress on them, it shall be dissolved.
16. Rules and recommendations for the procedures to be followed by TEI-chartered work groups, and the form to be taken by their drafts, shall be formulated by the editors and approved by the Technical Review Committee.
17. Work group heads shall provide progress reports to the Executive Committee at least semi-annually.
18. When a work group has completed a draft of a new or revised section of the Guidelines, it shall forward the draft to the editors, who shall either declare themselves satisfied with the draft, or return it to the work group with comments or suggested revisions.
19. The editors may return a draft on grounds of formal inadequacy of the draft, lack of clarity in the definition of the tag set, stylistic problems, overlap with or inconsistency with other portions of the TEI encoding scheme, or substantive problems. They may also make suggestions for improvement without claiming that the draft is inadequate. On substantive questions, the views of the work group are assumed prima facie correct, but the editors may request reconsideration of substantive questions, giving reasons. On formal, stylistic, and editorial questions, and on questions of consistency with the rest of the TEI encoding scheme, the views of the editors are assumed prima facie correct, but the work group may request reconsideration of the editors' suggestions, giving reasons.
20. When both the work group and the editors are satisfied with the draft, it shall be transmitted to the Technical Review Committee for comment prior to its publication as a TEI draft. Comments on a draft received within seven days of its transmission to the Technical Review Committee shall be included in an appendix to the published draft.
21. After the expiration of seven days, the draft shall be published as a TEI draft, made available for public comment, and sent to outside technical reviewers named by the work group or editors, for comment and suggestions.
22. If the work group and editors are unable to agree on mutually satisfactory revisions of the draft, they will refer the matters of disagreement to the Technical Review Committee for advice and resolution.
23. At its periodic meetings, the Technical Review Committee shall consider public comment received on published drafts, and take one of the following actions on each draft which has been published for at least three months prior to the Technical Review Committee meeting:
24. The Technical Review Committee shall take no final action on drafts which have been made available for public comment less than three months prior to the first day of its meeting.
25. In revising the text of sections of the Guidelines for publication, after the approval of the Technical Review Committee, the editors shall restrict themselves to making editorial changes and correcting obvious errors. (For a definition of corrigible error, see document TEI ED W57.) Proposals for changes of a more serious nature shall be referred to the appropriate work group or to the Technical Review Committee for action.
26. Each year, the Executive Committee shall ascertain the total amount of funding to be available for work group meetings in the coming year, and allocate it among the work groups charged with handling current work items.