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Re: [lojban] presentation of lojban
At 05:05 PM 11/23/01 -0500, Rob Speer wrote:
On Fri, Nov 23, 2001 at 04:30:19PM -0500, pycyn@aol.com wrote:
> I would downplay our
> community -- by the time it was 45, Esperanto had several million
relatively
> competent speakers and a library of several hundred (perhaps thousand)
books;
> even if you put Lojbans age at 10 or so, Esperanto -- with only the
> international snail mail of the end of the 19th century -- had many
times our
> number of competent speakers and dozens of books.
On that end, I think we need either an update of lojban.org or a new
site that we can point people interested in Lojban to - someone coming
across the web page now would get the impression that nothing has been done
with the language for a year, and if they persist in being interested,
they're directed to various aging web sites and old texts. It's a wonder
anyone at all shows up on lojban-beginners, because I haven't seen it
publicized _anywhere_.
Lojban has not been publicized anywhere, in part because we have been so
poor on follow-through to anyone who responds, except to sell them a book
and/or point them to the list. We have not had a usable introductory
packet since 1993, and Nick's brochure update is to be the replacement for
that, at the publication of which we may be more able to deal with
significant new queries about the language.
As for the web page, we have been working on a turnover of web page
management to Robin Powell, who will also be hosting the site. Once that
transfer is done, and it could take place literally at any moment because
the CAIS people have been requested to make the change, Robin will then be
making some changes and enhancements, one of which will surely be to make
sure the page changes often enough that no one asks why it never changes.
Unfortunately, my coming from the pre-Internet generation, I have not
had the creativity nor even the understanding to fathom why the main page
would be expected to change frequently when the language is now baselined
and not changing, and when we have few new products. Instead, I put the
link to Evguenie Sklyanin's links page, which DOES change often and which
points to the variety of other pages that also change, and the link to the
Web ring that also links to key sites that change, and hoped that this
would do. Alas it hasn't been enough, and I am happy to turn over the job
of making the pages interesting, while preserving their primary archival
function, to Robin.
If we had a way to show people where stuff is going on - the text
repository on digitalkingdom, the IRC channels, the "Lojban for
Beginners" draft, the Wiki, and of course the mailing lists - I think we
could increase the size of the community drastically.
One we get the new brochure book done, which of course will be after Nick
gets resettled in Australia, we will probably be ready to do
something. Finances remain extremely tight, so we cannot print-publish
both of Nick's books at once, but getting the brochure done will give us a
shot to grow a market that will finally pay off the remaining printing debt
from the reference grammar. Then, after his lesson book is published, we
will more seriously resume efforts on some sort of dictionary publication.
lojbab
--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org