From lojbab@lojban.org Mon Sep 27 05:40:16 2010 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list llg-board); Mon, 27 Sep 2010 05:40:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: from eastrmmtao105.cox.net ([68.230.240.47]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1P0D04-00071V-Tc for llg-board@lojban.org; Mon, 27 Sep 2010 05:40:16 -0700 Received: from eastrmimpo01.cox.net ([68.1.16.119]) by eastrmmtao105.cox.net (InterMail vM.8.00.01.00 201-2244-105-20090324) with ESMTP id <20100927123957.YASZ14030.eastrmmtao105.cox.net@eastrmimpo01.cox.net> for ; Mon, 27 Sep 2010 08:39:57 -0400 Received: from [192.168.0.100] ([70.179.118.163]) by eastrmimpo01.cox.net with bizsmtp id Bofw1f00B3Xcbvq02ofwZh; Mon, 27 Sep 2010 08:39:57 -0400 X-VR-Score: -100.00 X-Authority-Analysis: v=1.1 cv=Ve2E6xT+YqPv90BJPa9Z7cy3eVbY/842O+E6p2NWdSs= c=1 sm=1 a=59we2q7mdb0A:10 a=8nJEP1OIZ-IA:10 a=7ls7RdmwX4RvLZNVULbZcg==:17 a=8YJikuA2AAAA:8 a=-ycwSECVc8M1VACDBA0A:9 a=FDv5EheR4e5pmV0UNssA:7 a=FDsU9w5yyCgmacT8G30H3SGfo0AA:4 a=wPNLvfGTeEIA:10 a=dxBpO5_FDU0A:10 a=izPOWwBAw0hXIkbj:21 a=Jg_Qx6L4HTxGUwP3:21 a=7ls7RdmwX4RvLZNVULbZcg==:117 X-CM-Score: 0.00 Authentication-Results: cox.net; none Message-ID: <4CA090A0.8010807@lojban.org> Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 08:40:00 -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: New Board meeting References: <4C9A674F.5020102@lojban.org> <4C9C9D74.5030603@lojban.org> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam_score: 0.8 X-Spam_score_int: 8 X-Spam_bar: / X-Spam_report: Spam detection software, running on the system "chain.digitalkingdom.org", has identified this incoming email as possible spam. The original message has been attached to this so you can view it (if it isn't spam) or label similar future email. If you have any questions, see the administrator of that system for details. Content preview: Veijo Vilva wrote: > On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Bob LeChevalier, President and > Founder - LLG wrote: > >>Everyone appears to be here > > and I'm beginning to feel this Board meeting is going to be about as > lively as the AGM. [...] Content analysis details: (0.8 points, 5.0 required) pts rule name description ---- ---------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -0.0 RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE RBL: Sender listed at http://www.dnswl.org/, low trust [68.230.240.47 listed in list.dnswl.org] 0.8 BAYES_50 BODY: Bayes sX-archive-position: 699 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 Veijo Vilva wrote: > On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Bob LeChevalier, President and > Founder - LLG wrote: > >>Everyone appears to be here > > and I'm beginning to feel this Board meeting is going to be about as > lively as the AGM. which is why I question the effectiveness of email meetings. It gets the job done, eventually - if the chairman can stay attentive. But the interaction is lacking. > >>Should I offer to continue as President? > > Before we discuss the person of the President, I think we ought to > discuss what is required of the President in the present situation - > and also of the members and the whole formal LLG. I will accept that > After we kind of > dissolved "Lojban Central", our Academie Francaise role, there has > been a certain loss of purpose. "Lojban Central", as I understood the concept, was never the same thing as the Board or the membership. It was the technical leadership of the language work, and it has more or less been replaced by byfy, which has the Academie Francaise role. Lojban Central would turn to the membership as a representative body to ratify decisions that were bigger than we wanted to take responsibility for about the direction of the language (i.e. declaring the baseline). But the members haven't really been formally making decisions about the language since the gismu list was frozen. LLG, in its membership, and Board sense, is a non-profit organization intended to support community activities, education, as well as academic research on Lojban. (Being the right kind of non-profit, in the US, donations to the organization are tax-deductible, and we don't pay taxes on money made from activities within our approved chartered purpose.) > Mere administration isn't fun, and there is also a clear contradiction between the requirements for > membership (as defined in the Bylaws) and the requirements of the > administration. Please explain. What I think you mean by "the administration" is the responsibility of the formal organization, and hence the Board, but not its sole responsibility. But we've striven as much as possible to have jobs requiring a lot of time get delegated away from the directors. Thus the website was delegated to you a long time back, and later to Robin. The job of the Board is to decide things on a day to day basis, of the membership to set policy on a longer term basis simply because they aren't constantly on-th-job. The job of the officers is to execute those decisions, with the Secretary handling communications (and hence in charge of the website) and tracking the money, while the President having the primary job of leadership. > I think we ought to take a half step back, i.e., not > back to concerning ourselves with "the letter of the law" but with the > spirit. The present requirements for membership are only relevant if > the LLG as an organization is still concerned with Lojban at some > linguistic level, it is not necessary to be a linguist or what so ever > for mere administration. It is not necessary to be a linguist in order to be a member. I think you've focused on the first clauses of the relevant articles as if they were the only one. > The Logical Language Group, Inc. is established to promote the > scientific study ... to implement and experiment ... to devise and > promote applications ... to conduct and support experimental and > scholarly research ... to communicate with and to educate interested > persons and organizations ... to devise and develop means and > instruments needed ... and to accumulate and publish the results ... may > award grants to individuals for experimentation, travel, publication, > study and similar activities. The tasks associated with "administration" tend to be the ones at the end of that list, as well as the ones required by law needed to keep our charter. > Qualifications of persons proposed for membership shall be (a) > competence in one or more of the fields of science or scholarship > listed in Article 2, above, and/or (b) high personal dedication to > the purposes of The Logical Language Group, Inc. as set forth in that > Article. People of type (a) are important in deciding what sorts of grants to give for research. But since we don't have money to make such grants, and hence make no decisions about them, we don't have a lot of need for academic competence in our membership. Thus we are left with "high personal dedication" to the language as the primary qualification. >>I have not given the job the time >I< think it needs, > > Time for what, in your opinion? What I think that the President should be doing, in addition to what I do, is being visible in the community, promoting the activities the Board wants promoted, interacting with people on IRC. In a word, "leadership". Kind of what Matt was unofficially doing before he became President %^) (which is one reason we elevated him to the Board and gave him the job in spite of his reluctance to do the other half of the job). And Robin has been extremely effective at the leadership role for much of the times in the last decade. But the admin side is burning him out (along with his non-Lojban life perhaps), as it did me a decade earlier. In many ways I started burning out when I no longer had time to do the "leadership" which in those days meant publishing JL and le lojbo karni, and actively participating in the mailing list. My life is not web-based, so I never quite made the transition to wiki-writing, IRC, and blogs, which are ways I could do the leadership now in the on-line community. I've toyed with the idea of resuming JL, which could be published on-line as well as by mail, but I'm not up to actually DOING it right now. >>Robin at the time suggested that all I needed to do was stay >>out of the way of people trying to get things done > > So basically the job of the President would be just that of a chairman > of the Annual and Board meetings? That is the minimum job (which I've been able to manage). Ideally, the President should do a lot more. > That is an awful waste of resources. > The Board is small, and all hands are needed, not so much for mere > administration, there isn't too much of that after all and many purely > technical tasks can be delegated to outsiders, as for trying to find > a way of preventing an organisational withering away. This year the > AGM has been more like a corpse than a real meeting and not a place to > discuss the way ahead, not without a proper preparation, that is. Mailing list meetings are too slow-paced to be other-than a "like a corpse". Having to wait 3 days or more to make sure everyone has had a chance to respond to the last item before moving to the next, does that. Then, when we hit a topic of interest, those who live on line manage a flurry of emails and they're talked out on the subject within the hour, and gone away, before someone like me who normally checks email once a day (moving to twice a day when he is expecting something) even knows that they said something). And there are others who clear aren't checking Lojban mail much more than every several days. I think that a prepared-agenda meeting where discussions took place on an advanced-decided limited-time schedule might do better. IRC meetings were on such a schedule, and were lively and got things done. But people (other than me) clearly are opposed to IRC meetings. Advanced preparation requires that someone do that preparation, and I can't do that without a lot higher level of effort. This year, I did more preparation than usual, people put together a topic list which was placed on a web page. I'm not sure if anyone looked at it though. I really have no idea what people want to talk about until they speak up at the meetings. I have a list of topics, but no way of knowing if people have anything to say about them. (And it must be said that even when I was in the top of my form, I never really knew what people would spend time discussing at the annual meetings.) Hmm. I wonder if, rather than structuring the meetings around email, or IRC, if we structured them around the topic list as a wiki page, or maybe use an on-line forum. (We don't have one of those in the Lojban community) On-line forums seem to have threads and topics, and we could thus be discussing all of the agenda at once. But I have no idea what is involved in setting one up or running one, and only once in my life have I ever contributed to one, because I avoid participating in things that I have to log into (I never remember the password) > A Board was elected, not with much enthusiasm, a Board with members most > of whom have real Real Life constraints to be taken into account. Now > the Board ought to find enough Spirit to first of all motivate its own > members and then the general membership. Here the role of the > President is decisive, and he ought to have enough time, motivation > and perspective to prepare ideas for the Board to discuss and prepare > for a GM, ordinary or extraordinary. I think this would be definitely > better than the President delegating the preparation to another member > of the Board. Given our meager resources, the President ought to be a > Head instead of a Figurehead, I agree. That is what I meant by needing more effort than I've been able to put into it. > the Board ought to be something more than an accounting office Yes. > and the membership ought to be resuscitated to have some real function. The membership has the function of setting the course for the next year. It doesn't need a lot of resuscitation, EXCEPT during that once-a-year period. But it would be nice if people had more to say at that point. lojbab