[Egyptian] Cambridge: conclusions and next steps

[Mark-Jan Nederhof]

Nigel,

You are absolutely right. The tone of my message was unacceptable. 
I offered my apologies to Heleen off-list. 

For now, I need to take a break until Friday. Too much time pressure with unrelated
matters.

Mark-Jan

On Wednesday 20 Jul 2016 15:58:59 Nigel Strudwick wrote:
> Mark-Jan
> 
> I was going to send this privately, but I think it has wider implications. 
> 
> I hate to say this, but a little more tact in emails is never a bad thing. Do consider retracting or modifying that statement. 
> 
> If Heleen, and by inference I, cannot understand the issues, then you and the other people putting forward proposals should bear some of the responsibility because you have not communicated it in a way those of us not intimately involved can understand. 
> 
> I made a great play in my closing remarks that what is being done needs to be understandable and usable by the Egyptologists for whom you say you are doing this (as otherwise it reverts to being an intellectual exercise). And please remember that all of you had been thrashing these things around for some time but it took someone like me, strongly backed by Heleen, to get you all together to move things on this much.
> 
> Personally, I cannot see why a video call (or calls) between a handful of you cannot work, but you may be right. Perhaps you do need another meeting, a technical one, just for the small group of you where you don’t need to worry about people like me asking silly questions and holding you back. I am fine with that. But I see from this present debate the somewhat entrenched positions, which I thought were breaking down on the Monday evening and Tuesday, re-emerging.
> 
> Nigel
> 
> 
> 
> On 20 Jul 2016, at 15:41, Mark-Jan Nederhof <mn31 at st-andrews.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> > On Wednesday 20 Jul 2016 16:00:18 heleen wilbrink wrote:
> >> let Michael, Bob
> >> and Mark-Jan do a conference call or so soon to A. make sure there is one
> >> proposal that all agree on and can be shared with the group and B. give
> >> guidelines to Simon/Serge/Stephane for what examples they should look in their
> >> databases 
> > 
> > Heleen,
> > 
> > It is kind of you to try to coordinate, but you don't seem to understand the issues. 
> > There are already two competing proposals since 2016-06-30, when we uploaded
> > ours onto L2. What I've tried to do in the past emails is to point out that a naive 
> > attempt to pick and choose from the two proposals leads to inconsistencies. We 
> > need a coherent design, not majority votes for wishlists of individual elements,
> > nor a friendly compromise that leaves us with ambiguous or inconsistent notation.
> > 
> > The problems I have pointed out are quite technical, difficult, and not amenable
> > to oral communication alone, and a conference call is not going to bring us any closer 
> > to a resolution.
> > 
> > Mark-Jan
> > 
> > 
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> 
> 
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