Hello, my dear fellow Lojbanists.
A complaint on our LiveJournal community page caught my attention. It
said, that the Lojbanic Community should move to a web based bulletin
board software solution and dump mailing lists.
While the opinions on web based bulletin boards are not subject of the
discussion I want to start right here, it did make one thing clear to me:
The Lojbanic Community is hardly exposed to the casual visitor to our
"flagship website" at all.
Free your mind and open up lojban.org. What do you see?
You will have to agree to me, that - apart from LiveJournal, which had a
bit of activity recently - it looks deserted. The "news" are already
more than half a year old!
The next thing you see is an explanation of the main features of Lojban,
linking to an old Scientific American article.
After that you see the LJ blog on which only a few people post sometimes.
I think, that our wonderful Lojbanic Community is not represented in a
sufficient way at all.
The "help page", that is linked from the main page looks pretty cramped
and not really inviting, even though it does mention the mailing list
and IRC channel, which - to me - are the main places where the Lojbanic
Community is.
This state has to be remedied and there are plans.
With this post I am testing the waters for initiation of the grand
Lojbanistani Restructuration of Website Task Force
I have composed this Roadmap for LRWTF actions in the future and I
welcome and constructive or explosive criticism and will gladly accept
"patches" - additions, removals and modifications alike!
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Road to Success for the LRWTF
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1) Make it obvious, that the Lojbanic Community is living and breathing.
By looking at the lojban website you'll get the impression that
Lojban has been dead for some time now. Change that!
a) Expose the Lojbanic IRC channel and the Mailing List to the
visitor immediately.
b) Get into the habit of summarizing recent Lojbanic Community
events on a wiki page or some sort of other appropriate medium.
2) Make the Mailing List more accessible.
While mailing lists are probably the most awesome non-realtime
forums in existence currently, it indeed is true, that it's not
familiar to the casual websurfer.
a) Make the mailing list archives easier on the eye.
b) Make the mailing list archives easier to navigate and figure out.
c) Find or develop a front-end to the mailing list that looks and
behaves like a typical bulletin board software.
3) Make the lojbanic website all about the community!
Well, I'm not talking about web2.0 community social networking stuff
or similar things. However, there should be at least a central
"commons" site on the wiki that lists people in a pretty format of
some sort, maybe with a profile-ish tabular list - have a field for
ni jbocre, icons for "on irc" and "on the mailing list" and all that
and maybe others.
4) Remove cruft from the Wiki
The navigation menu on the left is a bit crowded and if we could
come up with a more sensible, clear structure with stronger visual
cues for what's important/big/a headline or so, that would be great!
There's also lots of old and completely outdated pages on the Wiki,
which could use some rewriting or removing!
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For this endeavor to succeed I need at least one person to help me (kick
me in the butt as soon as i get lazy, that is!), so please tell me what
you think of my plans :)
PS: I apologize for the weird wordings; we've been dealing with
political speech in german as well as english lessons recently and I got
kind of carried away :)
- Timo
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