Received-SPF: none (google.com: lojbab@lojban.org does not designate permitted sender hosts) client-ip=68.230.241.214;
Message-ID: <537B9635.4000805@lojban.org>
Date: Tue, 20 May 2014 13:51:49 -0400
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.5.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] the future of Lojban's leadership
References: <26AH1o00w56Cr6M016AJaX> <53760BA6.60403@lojban.org> <2vcD1o00T56Cr6M01vcEdZ>
In-Reply-To: <2vcD1o00T56Cr6M01vcEdZ>
Reply-To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Precedence: list
Mailing-list: list lojban@googlegroups.com; contact lojban+owners@googlegroups.com
Sender: lojban@googlegroups.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
X-Spam_score: -0.0
X-Spam_score_int: 0
X-Spam_bar: /

On 5/17/2014 3:35 AM, la durka wrote:
> I have a problem with dismissing Facebook and IRC out of hand, because
> that's a large portion of the Lojban-speaking community.

I'm not sure how you know that.  I've not seen any useful measures of 
the size of the community of late.  When I visit the IRC channel, I see 
several dozen tags supposedly logged in, but at most a couple of people 
respond when I say something, so I'm not sure those tags are real 
people.  There are several groups that come up when I search for Lojban 
on Facebook.  The largest in terms of members seems to be run by gleki - 
there are 1353 members but a large percentage of those were added by 
gleki or someone else, so we really have no way of knowing if those 
people are all participating (I am not, since my limited Facebook 
activity is strictly for my family; I've intended to set up a separate 
Lojban-related account, but I simply don't have time for it, even if I 
had a clue how to make good use of social media).

There is a Lojban language page which says that 1071 "like" the topic 
and 2400 "speak" the language, and that is apparently those who have 
actually said that they speak Lojban, and another Lojban "product" page 
that 310 like. And a lojban community page with 78 who "like" it.  I 
also see Swedish and Brazilian groups, and have heard that there are 
several other such groups.

And how many of those 1353 actually have said that they support this 
proposal?  Your github summary says 21 to 1.  22 people is NOT a large 
portion of the community.

>And if nothing else, the
> present "unofficial community motion" (or whatever it should be called), and
> the amount of support it's seen, including from some LLG members, has shown
> that there is a lot of will among Lojbanists for things to move forward.

Of course there is will for things to move forward.  That has been true 
for years.  What there isn't are workers willing to work as part of a 
team to move forward on the tasks that team leaders need them to do. 
Everyone wants to do their own thing in their own way, and as a result 
the usefulness of any particular effort is accidental.

selpa'i has NOT shown any particular willingness to be a team worker in 
the past, and has been rather quick to make and/or adopt proposals based 
on his/her own standards.  Anyone who is leading the standardization 
among other things has to NOT be someone who is pushing their own 
proposals to change the existing standard. Standards necessarily are 
conservative or they aren't really standards.

> I admit to not really knowing what's been going on in the LLG recently
> (in fact
> I can't be the only one who wasn't even aware the meeting was going on).

If you were a voting member, you would have known.  There is a members 
mailing-list and all members are subscribed to it as a matter of 
requirement.

Non-members can also participate, but they need to ask, in order to be 
added to the list.  Anyone who reads the Bylaws, so that they know the 
responsibilities thereof, and who decides that they want to serve can 
ask to become a formal member.  Rarely is someone who asks, and then 
shows up at the next meeting (i.e indicates their presence when asked in 
the mailing list) gets turned away.

The last (2013) meeting was not well-publicized because it had been 
delayed beyond reason (i.e it hadn't started before 2014), in part by my 
own distractions.  The next annual meeting should be late this summer, 
and I'll try to better publicize it among the general community - which 
generally means the Lojban and Lojban-beginners mailing list, since I 
have no idea how to use other means.

> Part of this is the minutes not being published of course.

Another problem we have is that no one wants to take the time to write 
up minutes.  Robin considers the mailing list archive to itself be the 
"minutes"


> Anyway a few things are clear. Everyone wants a bright future for
> Lojban, and
> agrees that there is work to do to make the language specification adequate.
> That is the BPFK's responsibility, but the BPFK has been stalled for a long
> time (and some have pointed to the existing mechanisms, but they are
> demonstrably not working).

There is almost no one actually doing any work on BPFK stuff.  Everybody 
is doing their own thing, so nothing gets done on the group effort.

> Maybe it is time to change the structure, not in
> order to change the ideals, but in order to get things moving faster towards
> those ideals.

The structure has changed several times, to no avail.

No structure will improve anything unless people start doing the 
required work, and completing it.

Right now, the highest priority is getting a revised CLL including NO 
changes to the language, only typos and errata that have been discovered 
since the 1997 publication.  After that is done (and formatted for 
possible publication, since we are down to fewer than 150 copies of the 
1st edition), xorlo will be the first modification to that baseline CLL, 
since it is the only approved language change so far.

dotside would likely be the second change considered, due to wide 
support and a relative lack of interaction with other features.  Someone 
would need to write change pages for CLL to reflect that proposal for it 
to actually be added to the book before 2nd edition.

Then there are the raft of BPFK sections that need to be completed, as 
others have pointed out.  They have to be provisionally voted on once 
completed.

When ALL BPFK sections are completed, the whole needs to be voted on as 
a new language baseline.  Since the baseline document for the grammar 
and cmavo is CLL (absent a published dictionary), anything in the 
approved BPFK pages that requires a change to CLL needs to be turned 
into change pages.  No sense in doing that until the BPFK pages are 
themselves approved in isolation.

Call this CLL 2.5 edition, and will constitute adequate documentation of 
the current language baseline.

Either CLL 2 or CLL 2.5 will presumably see print as the next edition 
before the current print stock runs out, probably before the end of 
2015, and perhaps much sooner.

This then will form a new CLL baseline standard. Only then can formal 
changes to the baseline properly be considered, and they should be 
written in both BPFK page format and as CLL change pages in order to be 
properly considered.  But that cannot be done until 2.5 is done, because 
you don't know what you are trying to change.

> Some people have said, what exactly are we proposing here? It's a good
> question. To put it one way, we're simply trying to coalesce around
> selpa'i and unstick the development of Lojban from the current gridlock.

The gridlock is stuck solely because the community has proven unwilling 
to do the work necessary to properly document the baseline, and has left 
the job in the hands of Robin or whichever other individual has been 
willing to put his name in (and demonstrate their commitment by actually 
working on said baseline - which so far as I know, selpa'i has not).

We don't need a "caretaker" who isn't willing to do the work.

> - A new committee takes on the task of finishing the language documentation,

Do it, and then we'll talk.

>    and discussing + approving/rejecting (by vote or consensus) any further
>    change proposals.

Not on the agenda until the existing language is documented.

>Presumably, the active members of the BPFK would join this committee.

There are no "active members", per se.  If there were, there would be 
activity.

> - We put selpa'i at the head of this committee.

Why selpa'i?  I have seen no demonstrated qualifications comparable to 
Robin, and Nick Nicholas before him.  (I haven't taken the BPFK jatna 
job myself because I haven't consistently put in the time actually 
working.  If all that were needed were an adjudicator or caretaker, I 
would claim that I myself am as qualified as anyone.)

>Someone needs to have the power to resolve disputes

Robin has that power currently, and is far more qualified than anyone 
else, both on the basis of demonstrated language skill and commitment to 
the baseline process.

But there should be no disputes.  (He hasn't hardly had to resolve any 
in several years). Just do the work.

  and selpa'i/Miles has the will and skill to do it

He hasn't done the work, and whether you think he has the will or the 
skill, he has demonstrated neither to the people who have been 
responsible for the language up until now.

> (oops,
>    didn't mean to rhyme there). Of course, someone chosen by the
> community can
>    always be removed by the same community in the unlikely event that
> they fail
>    to do a good job.

"The community" has no basis to choose except through LLG; there is no 
other entity that purports to represent the community.  Someone could 
form a splinter organization, but they would have trouble proving that 
they represent "the community".  The various official Lojban mailing 
lists are at this point the means whereby LLG communicates with the rest 
of the community, though the IRC channel has served as an informal 
means- but there are too few actually participating in IRC discussions 
at any one time.

> - The language development is organized as much as possible like a software
>    project.

Been there, done that.  We're in the software documentation phase, the 
part that the programmers never like to do, and try to get out of doing 
as much as possible.  The whole concept of "baselines" used with Lojban 
comes from the configuration management aspect of formal software 
development (from the pre-Internet era, which is when I did my 15 years 
in the field - my wife still programs, doing maintenance of production 
applications, and their configuration management is even tighter than I 
worked under).

And while it is sometimes possible to work on the next phase of a 
software development before this one is finished, it generally is 
wasteful if not fruitless to do so when the specification is incomplete, 
which it necessarily is for Lojban until we have the current situation 
documented.

> There's an issue tracker so that discussions can be had about
>    multiple issues at the same time,

Discussions other than as needed to get the existing language documented 
are not part of the job.  We can't and won't stop people from talking 
about their pet language proposals, but only the commitment to consider 
none of them before the language is documented offers even the 
possibility of the latter occurring.

> yet in an organized fashion, and the
>    important bits (definitions, grammar rules, etc) are in a repository.

The byfy pages serve that now.

>    some kind of source control (Github? eh?)

Some people have a clue what github is.  I don't.  I think Robin has 
used it for configuration management of group translation efforts.  But 
I work offline, usually in face-to-face discussion with my wife, and 
find web-based work incomprehensible (editing a tiki page is my limit in 
online skill)

> - Everyone is encouraged to contribute to the language documentation and
>    development.

That is the case now. Look how much is NOT being done.  Start doing it, 
and your voice will carry more weight as to HOW to be doing it.

  Contributions have to be approved by the aforementioned
> committee.
>    Membership on the committee would be decided by the committee
> (ultimately by
>    selpa'i, I guess)

What makes him/her qualified, as opposed to the people currently on the 
BPFK (which selpa'i could also be on if s/he were doing some work).

And why are you speaking for selpa'i rather than selpa'i?

>based on the strength of one's contributions and demonstrated skill in Lojban.\

We're waiting to see the contributions.

 From what little I know, selpa'i has been more involved in TLI Loglan 
(which named selpa'i a member of their "Loglan academy") than in Lojban 
during the last year.

> The idea is to keep bureaucracy to an absolute minimum, but to provide a
> platform and organizational process that will work (better than the BPFK has
> worked thus far) to move Lojban forward.

The only failing with the existing BPFK is that no one is willing to do 
the work, and stick with a task until completion.

> So, to conclude, there seem to be plenty of people who want progress and
> some
> inertia behind it. I've presented one possible model. What's the best way to
> work with the LLG so that such a thing can be considered?

Work on the existing documentation tasks, completing one of which de 
facto makes one an "active member of the BPFK".  If a few people were to 
do this, the process would become unstuck and people would find that 
there is no need for any new group.

lojbab

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.