[topicmapmail] Ontopia foundation...

[stuart yeates]

We're an active member of the TEI, and I can say that it certainly works 
very well for us.

The TEI is certainly seems more consensus driven than Apache seems to 
be. While apache seems to be centred on implementation of standards with 
  at least semi-formal descriptions, the TEI has a standard which is (a) 
described in the informal language of the humanities and (c) iteratively 
improved by consensus discussions on the list.

A significant proportion of the longer discussions on the TEI list 
result in updates/changes to the standard. Most commonly, the addition 
of examples and clarifications.

cheers
stuart

John A. Walsh wrote:
> The "society" suggested below sounds somewhat similar to the model
> used by the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium
> <http://www.tei-c.org/>, which maintains and promotes the TEI
> Guidelines, implemented as an XML vocabulary for encoding texts of all
> types, but particularly in digital humanities, digital library, and
> other scholarly contexts.
> 
> Institutions (typically universities, research institutions, and
> individual projects) and individuals may be members. There are
> relatively modest membership fees. The Consortium itself is a
> non-profit entity and membership fees are used to support the
> promotion and maintenance of the Guidelines, meetings, etc. There may
> be better models for funding a consortium/society than membership
> fees, but it may be worth looking closer at the TEI, which has a long
> and successful history, certainly in the academic/research community.
> 
> And the suggestion to look at aligning with an existing foundation,
> like Apache, is also very attractive.
> 
> John
> 
> On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Thomas Schwotzer
> <Thomas.Schwotzer at htw-berlin.de> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> it was a wonderful meeting in Oslo. Thanks for all!
>>
>> We had a discussion about legal issues, e.g.
>> official ownership of the code, domains etc.
>>
>> There are two ways to handle it (look at the slides):
>> - Ignoring. The code becomes open source and
>> anybody can work with it.
>> - We need a new third instance that gets the
>> legal copyrights of the software, the name (is it
>> already a trade mark?) etc. It is called "foundation"
>> on the slides.
>>
>> Founding a foundation seems to be expensive.
>>
>> I think there is an alternative:
>>
>> In Germany exists the legal construct of a
>> "Verein", a society. A German Verein can have
>> its own property. It can only make business in a very
>> limited manner, especially it's forbidden to make
>> noteworthy profit.
>>
>> Such a "Ontopia society" would be a non-profit legal
>> entity. This is what we like to have, isn't it.
>>
>> It's neither very complicated nor very expensive
>> to found a Verein. We could organize and probably
>> pay most of the founding costs.
>>
>> Currently, a colleague is about finding out if
>> foreign companies can be member of the board of
>> such a society and other details. Of course, this
>> is a crucial point. If so, it could be a practicable
>> and cheap alternative of an expensive foundation.
>>
>> We could organize this stuff.
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>> Best regards, Thomas
>>
>> --
>> Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas Schwotzer
>> HTW Berlin, University of Applied Sciences
>>
>> addr: HTW Berlin, Treskowallee 8, 10318 Berlin
>> room: VG 236
>> tel.: +49-178-1374275
>> fax.: +49-30-5019-2671
>>
>> http://www.f4.htw-berlin.de/lehrende/schwotzer.html
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> 
> 
> 


-- 
Stuart Yeates
http://www.nzetc.org/       New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/     Institutional Repository