Received: from localhost ([::1]:48147 helo=stodi.digitalkingdom.org) by stodi.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.85) (envelope-from ) id 1ZsXlP-0001vY-6n; Sat, 31 Oct 2015 08:08:15 -0700 Received: from eastrmfepo202.cox.net ([68.230.241.217]:37256) by stodi.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.85) (envelope-from ) id 1ZsXlI-0001vH-Ii for llg-members@lojban.org; Sat, 31 Oct 2015 08:08:13 -0700 Received: from eastrmimpo110 ([68.230.241.223]) by eastrmfepo202.cox.net (InterMail vM.8.01.05.15 201-2260-151-145-20131218) with ESMTP id <20151031150802.FXBY19528.eastrmfepo202.cox.net@eastrmimpo110> for ; Sat, 31 Oct 2015 11:08:02 -0400 Received: from [192.168.0.102] ([72.209.242.25]) by eastrmimpo110 with cox id br811r0040ZbUo801r81s9; Sat, 31 Oct 2015 11:08:02 -0400 X-CT-Class: Clean X-CT-Score: 0.00 X-CT-RefID: str=0001.0A020205.5634D952.0042,ss=1,re=0.000,fgs=0 X-CT-Spam: 0 X-Authority-Analysis: v=2.0 cv=FaLpMuC6 c=1 sm=1 a=wUnt6a9YVw6vJyLyWfj5jg==:17 a=8YJikuA2AAAA:8 a=Kqjl9o7Ck-CXAv_c0CAA:9 a=QEXdDO2ut3YA:10 a=wUnt6a9YVw6vJyLyWfj5jg==:117 X-CM-Score: 0.00 Authentication-Results: cox.net; none From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc. To: llg-members@lojban.org Message-ID: <5634D963.2050103@lojban.org> Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2015 11:08:19 -0400 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.3.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Spam-Score: -1.9 (-) X-Spam_score: -1.9 X-Spam_score_int: -18 X-Spam_bar: - Subject: [Llg-members] LLG Annual Meeting: President's Report X-BeenThere: llg-members@lojban.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.20 Precedence: list List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Reply-To: llg-members@lojban.org Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; Format="flowed" Errors-To: llg-members-bounces@lojban.org We've given a few days to allow members to turn their focus to the list. Not all of you have done so, but we have reasonable attendance, plenty enough for quorum, and with the successful notice this year, that is sufficient to move on. Hopefully the remaining members will start to pay attention soon. Moving on to officer and committee reports, I think the most important thing that I can say as President is to repost something I sent to the Board back in May, regarding the choice of officers. I was asking for someone to step forward who would be an active Vice President, transitioning in activity and responsibility to eventually take over as President. I did not get such a candidate from the current Board (and indeed only 4 members of the Board significantly participated in the limited amount of business that we discussed). And Rosta volunteered to serve as a place holder, offering to help search for someone more ambitious for the longer term. gleki seemed to feel that only US residents could adequately serve as officers, given the need to be cognizant of American legal expectations for non-profit corporations. My ideas, and theirs, should be discussed by the membership, and used as a consideration in electing the Board for the next year. So here is what I said. Please discuss. I am going to try to be on IRC Sunday noonish (EDT) for discussion, but I cannot promise, and in any case this should be done as much as possible on email so that all members have access to the discussion. (Non-members present are also welcome to opine.) > President and Vice President need a little more consideration. I am a little reluctant to continue as President. As I am sure everyone has noticed, zo'o, I have been at best inconsistent in my timeliness in running meetings. I've also been unable to keep up my intended commitment to show up on IRC every Sunday noonish (EDT). Otherwise, I have probably been only minimally adequate in the leadership department, but I remain a major source of "institutional memory", which is important this year when most of the Board and at least 2 officer positions have turned over. I am willing to serve one more year as President, or as Vice President if the Board prefers. But I strongly desire that at least one person step forward as now-or-future President to fill the other position. If I am President, I will be calling on this person as VP to exercise several leadership activities in the coming year, including regular participation in IRC and reporting to the Board on what the community wants LLG to do. Here is my statement of "vision". The coming year will hopefully include the publication of the 1.1 edition of CLL through Lightning Source, and I'd like to see at least a start on producing a similarly updated edition of Nick Nicholas and Robin Turner's Lojban textbook, and perhaps an update to the Introduction to Lojban book already published through Lightning Source. If we get all that done, a printed English/Lojban dictionary would finally finish what I committed to some 25 years ago but still have not delivered. Only when we can point to a published and available grammar, textbook, and dictionary do I see us as capable of truly promoting the language beyond the sort of word-of-mouth efforts that have sufficed for the last 25 years. LLG has somewhere in the neighborhood of US$20K, some of which needs to be spent on the above publications, and we may need to break down and pay some people to do some of the work, either per Ali's proposal for a paid Project Manager or for people to actually get in and produce the page markups needed to publish the other books (possibly Robin Powell might be willing to consult on *how* to do this, but we should not be expecting him to be willing to actually do the work). We then need to decide HOW to promote the language in a larger way than has been done so far. This might involve spending a larger amount of money than we have, in which case we need to think about fundraising. Our status as a non-profit corporation (for which, in the US at least, donations result in tax benefits) should make fundraising easier. There are also newer fundraising techniques like crowd-funding that could work. In addition to fundraising, a long time ago it was proposed that we could approach corporations for equipment donations, which could include new server hardware for the website and possibly hardware or software needed for specific research activities (such donations are sometimes easier to get than cash donations). Our non-profit status is useful here as well, but someone needs to figure out what we need, who could supply it, and then communicate with that supplier for the donation. Beyond publication, there are other tasks that need to be done, including a couple of other things that were proposed during the annual meeting, but which didn't get a motion or a second and were discussed only minimally. I'd like that for the next annual meeting we can have some things to decide during the meeting that are ready for action, rather than ideas that few have even thought about. The members list can be used to discuss such topics outside the formal meeting. I don't have the knowhow for many of these activities, and even less have the time and energy for them these days. And I don't seem to have the effective leadership skills for the IRC (and Skype) based community that I had during the snail-mail and live-Logfest-annual-meeting era. We need a President who can LEAD the community, and I am no longer that person. The one activity I am actually doing is my long-postponed Arabian Nights translation. I have a long-delayed LogFlash statistical analysis project that I have since forgotten the statistics expertise for. This was going to provide some insight on whether the gismu algorithm actually produced learnable words. I'd like to find someone else who could finally do that analysis. I'd like to see us produce something more sophisticated in the way of communicating activity news between the various Lojban communities. The old Ju'i Lobypli and le lojbo karni publications may no longer be viable these days, and perhaps what guskant was proposing in the annual meeting could point in a new direction. But expecially if the community is to grow, we need something. In addition to other things, if I am president and the other person is VP, I am going to call on whoever is elected to be an on-call chair for this meeting and for the annual meeting - someone I can work with who will keep the meetings going when I disappear for a week in the middle of things. So I can see my serving as a transition leader for another year or so, but new person/people needs to step up for the longer term, and at least one such person is needed now for LLG office. So I put my name in for President, being quite willing to change that to VP, or even to drop out, if one or more others are willing to step up. I am open to other suggestions as well. > The floor is open for discussion of the above for a couple of days while I decide what else I should report (we don't need any motions at this point). Other officers can also post their reports, along with any committee and project chairs. The byfy jatna in particular is obliged to report per the decision of the membership last year. lojbabs _______________________________________________ Llg-members mailing list Llg-members@lojban.org http://mail.lojban.org/mailman/listinfo/llg-members