Board Election 2021

In 2021, two seats are to be renewed: those previously occupied by Cristina Mussinelli (LIA) and Erik Pattenden (Firsty Group).

Self-nomination period: May 20th to June 5th 2021.

Voting period: June 24th to June 28th 2020 at midnight.

By our bylaws, any member in good standing is eligible to self-nominate a representative. Current or past members of the Board of Directors can re-apply for a new period of two years.

Here are the candidate statements we received for this election:

Cristina Mussinelli

I am kindly asking you to support my nomination for re-election to the EDRLab Board of Directors. I am running as Secretary General of Fondazione LIA (Libri Italiani Accessibili).

As Board member I will continue to actively support EDRLab, with my effort, knowledge and relationships, to achieve its mission of fostering the development of an open, interoperable and accessible digital publishing ecosystem in Europe. My presence in the Board as representative of an Italian organization, will also meet the goal of EDRLab of reflecting the European diversity.

In particular, I will do all my best to collaborate with the EDRLab management to define our main priorities for the next years and to achieve the following goals:

• support a wider and faster adoption of open standard as EPUB, by publishers for all different kind of publications (school texts, illustrated books, enhanced books, and complex layout books in general) with the provision of updated and timely information on the standard in general and on the activities of the working group, also through dedicated event or seminars, such as the Digital Publishing Summit.
• continue to develop reference open-source reading engine on every device platform available as the basis for developers to be able to provide good reading applications compliant with open standards.
• create awareness on the importance of standard adoption and related interoperability issue in the whole publishing value chain and in the international and European institutions involved in defining the policy for the publishing market.
• continue the commitment in the field of the accessibility of digital publishing contents for print impaired persons, especially taking in consideration the adoption of the EU Accessibility Act and chairing the recently created Accessibility Interest Group.
• make a specific plan to foster the growth of the European and international membership.

My role in Fondazione LIA, a non-profit organization that promotes the adoption of accessibility in the publishing industry through awareness-raising events, research on digital accessibility, training courses and consultancy activities, where I am also coordinating many activities at EU and international level will be particularly relevant for EDRLab. LIA’s initiatives are, in fact, strictly in line with the EDRLab commitment in the field of accessibility as they aim at expanding the access to editorial products of visually impaired readers: LIA encourages the integration and active participation in the cultural world of people with visual impairment, allowing to choose how, when and, above all, what to read.

Furthermore, Fondazione LIA is an organization created by AIE (Associazione Italiana Editori), one of the major EU trade associations, where I am also responsible of digital publishing activities. This could continue providing EDRLab a strong support in the European market to achieve its goals, thanks to consolidated relations with the most relevant European institutions and a long-lasting knowledge of the European publishing market. European publishers are investing in digital production processes, products and services and the attendance in the European market of the main international players is growing thus our focus on open standard definition issues, will be fundamental for the growth of on European market of digital contents, for fair competition and for the reduction of technological lock-in risks for consumers. AIE is one of the founders of FEP, the Federation of European Publishers, and is also part of the General Confederation of Italian Industries, it is member of IPA (International Publishers Association), EDITEUR, ISBN International Agency and ABPTOE (Association of Booksellers and Publishers Training Organizations in Europe). Finally, AIE devotes particular attention to the development of publishing standards, manages the Italian ISBN agency and the multilingual European DOI Registration Agency.

I am also co-chair of the W3C Digital Publishing Business Group, the international community developing and maintaining the Web standards, invited expert in the ‘OT UNI/CT 014/SC 04 “Automazione e documentazione” where I am involved in the standardization process of EPUB and of LCP and member of the Steering Committee of the Daisy European Inclusive Publishing Forum. I will able to support the EDRLab activities in these organization too.

Erik Pattenden

I am kindly asking you to support my nomination for re-election to the EDRLab Board of Directors. I am running as CTO of Firsty Group (Newbury, UK).

Firsty Group is an IT architect working on e-commerce, direct digital fulfilment and traditional print fulfilment solutions across the publishing industry. These projects have been for clients such as Bonnier, Macmillan, Hachette and Bloomsbury.

I am the product owner of Glassboxx, a unique direct to consumer (D2C) solution designed to enable authors, publishers and retailers to sell their audiobooks and eBooks directly to the end customer, with full, flexible, frictionless Digital Rights Management. Glassboxx uses LCP in Readium 1 and Readium 2, and Firsty have been one of the very first to integrate LCP into live end user apps on Android and iOS. LCP is now also integrated in its desktop app, which is a fork of Thorium Reader.

Being flexible and open source, Firsty see a very significant long term future for LCP and are keen to help with its direction and evolution at Board level.

Prior to being at Firsty, I was involved in IT development projects for large corporates in banking and manufacturing.