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Re: [lojban] Marketing lojban

At 05:06 PM 03/21/2001 -0800, seidensticker wrote:

With lojban well into its 5-year stable period,
Correction before you go too far... The language is baselined, except for the dictionary lexicon, but the "five year period" has not started yet, and will not start until at least the dictionary, and possibly also the textbook have been issued. 


I would think that there
would need to be an effort to get the word out.  The discussions here are
often interesting and I'm sure they're educational to the participants, but
I haven't seen anything about ways to market or advertise lojban's
existence.
I welcome such, but observe that as yet we have limited means with which to advertise, beyond word of mouth, and limited ability to deal with response to advertisements.
In the latter case, even with mere word of mouth, every couple of months I get snail mail from someone asking about Lojban, sometimes with a few dollars enclosed but no specific order (or an order for the 7-year-old nearly-obsolete level 0 package). When I can't get book orders out promptly, such snail mail just goes into a "wish I had time to deal with this, but I don't". I don't really know what to send such a person, since I don't know but have to presume that they have seen the website in order to get my address, and we have no products other than what is on the website.
Advertising would just lead to more response than we could deal with. JCB apparently got thousands of responses to his Scientific American article in June 1960, and thousands more when he advertised Loglan 1 in that magazine in the mid 70s. Most of those people got a brief blurb or nothing at all, and were lost because there was insufficient material with which to follow up on that initial burst of enquiry. Maybe around 300 subscribed to the "periodical" he started (edited by pycyn), which collapsed within a year or so to several dozen (and just enough old names added to continue to use bulk mail), which is pretty much where things stayed until the split that eventually led to Lojban.
LLG also had a snail mailing list of around 125 paid subscribers to Ju'i Lobypli, and maybe another 20-30 paid subscribers to le lojbo karni newsletter, both of which we intend to eventually continue (and honor subscriptions), but I could not sustain those publications between parenting and preparing books and supporting Lojban List, and nothing has come out since 1993-4.
We need to have more stuff - LOTS more stuff - and it cannot be so dependent on my meager abilities, before any massive increase in interest can be sustained. (Unless the increase were so massive that it would support a paid worker, and I'm not even dreaming of that level of success yet - we presently are barely covering operating expenses with book profits and the occasional donation, but our income remains at only a few thousand dollars a year). 


Is lojban supposed to be just a labor of love or a hobby, or is there a
consensus that we'd like to see lots more participants to really give the
language a trial run?
We'd like the latter, but getting from here to there is a trail that is unblazed. With Cowan and myself, who have historically done the bulk of the work to produce marketable "product", both tied up with parenting, we need more. xod's efforts to set up a webring and a Lojban-only online 'zine are good starts, but more is needed. 


Neither answer is wrong, but if it's the latter, I'm
curious to hear what the plans are.
Plans? It is hard to make plans when we have neither human nor fiscal resources. We proceed from day to day, with rather nebulous ideas of where we want to go next.
My wife Nora and Nick Nicholas, with occasional input from me and others, have been working on a new "level 0" book, and introduction to Lojban for people who have never heard of it, which could be produced and mailed much more cheaply than the present Xeroxed materials. It will probably include some version of Robin Turner's lessons.
John Cowan made an effort at a new LK issue, but it will need update, and I have to get the snail mail list updated (which is next in priority after the book orders and organization finances that have both lagged in the last few months) before we can actually send it.
We have had an incipient arrangement to try to turn over order fulfillment to a couple of Lojbanists who could possibly do a better job than I have, but we need to have things better organized and defined for anyone to successfully take over the mess that I have "managed" over the years. 


If its premature to issue press releases
We actually have released one, and we also advertised once in Discover magazine, and "officially" participated at one World Science Fiction convention. All of these were major moneylosers because we generated minimal income from each, less than enough to cover the expense of the advertisement, much less to sustain anything. 


or otherwise try to spread the word,
People are doing this. Look at the ever increasing numbers of Lojban Web pages - three years ago there was Veijo's helsinki site and not much else. 


what steps are being taken to get the language ready?
There is a volunteer page on the LLG web site. Other than what you see reported on Lojban List, almost nothing on that page is being taken up by volunteers. We tend to have a lot of people willing to develop software, though little real consensus on what software is needed or even useful. Written material in and about Lojban is sparse, other than conversations in the context of the list almost no original text, and translations have tended to be short pieces - nothing nearly of the scope of the Klingon translation of Hamlet, though we arguably have a much more complete language definition than the Klingonists do.
People have not been too helpful on the dictionary effort, which is one of the highest priorities, possibly because too few have a good idea what is needed, or because the workpile is so immense that one's individual contribution seems like it would be minimal rather than decisive. We're dealing with a couple manyears of work needed when people have scattered hours here and there rather than any dedicated block of time to commit.
While I made an improvement to the main website a year ago, it probably needs at least one more level of improvement in order to be really useful, and we need more stuff being updated on it on a more regular basis. That is also on my to-do list when all backlogged books are sent out.
Meanwhile, some efforts at publicizing are ongoing, short of directly advertising. Evguenie Sklyanin continues building a Russian Lojban web site and a proper translation of the gismu list (translations and web sites into more languages would be a big plus, with Spanish and Esperanto and German and Chinese being good target languages with a probable market - Hindi would also be good, but we don't know how to reach that market).
And that is probably the biggest problem we have - long term continuity of time on the part of people in order to sustain the projects that need to be done to completion. 

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