2020-09-30 TAC/UAC Coordinating Committee Meeting notes

2 min

Welcome, Dan!

All

20 min

Debriefing on recent activities

• onboarding/startup process

• Joint TAC and UAC meeting

• Governance Board meeting

All

Year is off to a good start. Group orientations went well. It was difficult to fill out some subteam rosters. In the future it may be best to identify the number of people needed to do the work of a subteam and the number of open slots, and then fill in from there. This may mean limiting the number of groups people join.

Times continue to be strange, as they have been since the start of covid. We continue to try to set reasonable expectations and work with members/subteams as much as possible to keep work going to the extent that it can without stretching people to thin. “Surviving” is a major theme of the year.

It was discussed whether the ArchivesSpace program/LYRASIS taking on some of the admin support of scheduling meetings/corralling group members may be helpful in lightening the burden for some teams without transferring that work to Council leaders. (see API working group) It was decided to keep an eye on this for now but not make immediate changes.

It was noted that the Governance Board has had some discussion in the past of possibly combining the two Councils. Kat explained the reasoning - need for greater communication, avoiding redundancy in effort - and that in many ways these concerns have been addressed now that the two Councils coordinate their work more. (Some of the arguments against - logistics of having a very large group, limiting participation if the group becomes smaller or narrower in scope - remain the same.)

20 min

Goals for the year

All

UAC is going to be focusing on promoting discussion (vs. reporting) in its meetings this year. One idea is having more guests from outside the Council to help bring new discussion items in. Members are most likely to participate in discussions that they feel connected to and engaged in.

Vice Chairs would like to get more comfortable with the bigger picture of ArchivesSpace before they move up into their Chair roles. It was discussed that there is an ongoing difficulty in getting people to step up to leadership roles and a general lack of awareness of the ArchivesSpace ecosystem. Discussion centered around have a leadership orientation/retreat where subteam leaders across the Councils could come together to discuss common issues and perhaps set some bigger picture goals/plans that could lay groundwork for making this easier in the future.

Some possible topics for leadership meeting:

• discussion of how all the parts of the ArchivesSpace ecosystem fit together

• Combining or making more teams cross-Council (see Users Docs and Tech Docs)

• Number of people needed on each team to do the work

• What do leaders need to make their jobs easier? What would make people more willing to take on leadership roles?

10 min

Anything else

• How to handle requests for member hiatuses? (do we want to add anything to https://archivesspace.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AC/pages/912719899 ?)

TAC has one member who has requested to go on hiatus for part of the year, UAC has one member who is working part-time this year. We will consider whether something needs to be written into the policy.

TAC is currently at 15 members. It is possible there may be a resignation prior to the new nominating season that brings it down to 14, which is less than what the bylaws mandate. How to handle that situation if it arises?