From lojbab@lojban.org Mon Jul 31 12:11:06 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list llg-board); Mon, 31 Jul 2006 12:11:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from eastrmmtao01.cox.net ([68.230.240.38]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G7dAK-0005Oz-Dq for llg-board@lojban.org; Mon, 31 Jul 2006 12:11:04 -0700 Received: from [127.0.0.1] (really [24.250.99.39]) by eastrmmtao01.cox.net (InterMail vM.6.01.06.01 201-2131-130-101-20060113) with ESMTP id <20060731191056.FQNC12077.eastrmmtao01.cox.net@[127.0.0.1]> for ; Mon, 31 Jul 2006 15:10:56 -0400 Message-ID: <44CE55B4.5030303@lojban.org> Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 15:10:44 -0400 From: Robert LeChevalier User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (Windows/20050923) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: llg-board@lojban.org Subject: [llg-board] Re: [ben@goertzel.org: Lojban: Interesting Grant Opportunity] References: <20060729213809.GA28137@chain.digitalkingdom.org> <20060730010916.GD28137@chain.digitalkingdom.org> <44CD79A8.5070803@lojban.org> <20060731165028.GL28137@chain.digitalkingdom.org> In-Reply-To: <20060731165028.GL28137@chain.digitalkingdom.org> Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Spam-Score: -2.6 (--) X-archive-position: 138 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: llg-board-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: llg-board-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: lojbab@lojban.org Precedence: bulk Reply-to: llg-board@lojban.org X-list: llg-board Robin Lee Powell wrote: > I'm not sure I'm following you. You're suggesting we try to gather > personal information about people interested in Lojban? Names, > addresses, occupations, interests? Yes. But there are two distinct aspects of this. One is as a social data base like Matt talks about, which is a good thing for the people themselves to participate in. But a social data base implies that the information is shared among the participants, which means that privacy is limited. The other is a *business* data base for us as the LLG-business, keeping track of our customers addresses and interests for "marketing" purposes (not that we actually do any marketing, but so that we know what our market is). The latter tends to be private and proprietary - in our case it would need to be proprietary in order to protect privacy. Primary uses would be instances like this where we want to find people of a certain quality, or when we want to contact as many Lojbanists of a particular geographic area because we are planning an "event" (when I traveled to the West Coast and to Boston, I made it a point to schedule an event where people could meet me and talk about Lojban), and of course to try to estimate the market for something that we might publish. To some extent, your Quickbooks accounting software provides that data base (in that prior to turnover we got all my mailing list information into it, and as updated as possible given my last several years of sloppiness). But as I found, keeping the data current is difficult, and it is even more so when the bulk of the community is online and never registers in any form. I'm not sure how much if any effort you have put (if any) into recording info about the people who buy things and donate money when you get such information (e.g. from a Paypal transaction). I did fine when I was mailing out JLs and LKs and therefore entered changes of address as they happened or got the mail returned (and I made sure to ask for address correction so that returned mail provided me a forwarding address if there was one). But I don't know how to build a data base of our online "customers", much less maintain it and track it with geographic locations. lojbab