Re: [lojban] Re: [lojban-announcements] Re: Lojban Web Programming Help?

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 03:20:38PM -0700, .alyn.post. wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 01:59:22PM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> > 
> > I am anti-confident; my confidence in people in this community
> > paying with their time has been thoroughly eroded over the
> > years.
[snip]
> 
> It is interesting to me that the Lojban community managed to
> publish a book, write a parser, and create a complete-ish
> specification for the language--yet this sentiment of not having
> support, help, encourgagement, or focus is commonly expressed.

As always in the free software community and its relatives, these
things were done by single people with little or no community
assistance.  The CLL was done almost entirely by John Cowan, as was
the parser.  There was a community behind it in a sense, but as far
as I can tell it was the same as the BPFK now: large-scale burts of
bitching, but a very few people (to my knowledge, 4 of them) doing
the actual writeups, let alone the book.

Also, that was all 20+ years ago, and centered around people that
lived in close proximity and met in person.

> Robin, is your expectation of what people will accomplish out of
> line? 

There being 5 other people that did half as much around here as I do
(in terms of the work that *needs* to be done, not just randomly
grabbing something fun and playing with it for a few days) would
make me *extremely* happy.  Whether that's out of line from your
POV, I dunno.

> Has the community changed?  Did it used to be better?

No and no, as far as I can tell.

> I'm curious as to what is going on, as I don't quite see us having
> the skills and committement to publish a book, but some of us did
> that anyway.

The next book will get published because someone, almost certainly
me, sits down and exerts a huge amount of effort, by themselves,
until it's done.  I'm hoping to take some advantaged of having local
people to work with, but we'll see.

The truth is that some things don't get done until and unless people
sit down and *actually do them*, in a concentrated, serious fashion.
There are things that will not get done by waiting until some member
of a large community is "in the mood", period.  It took me a decade
of being part of this community to understand that.  It's not really
a criticism, it's simply a truth.  I just wish there were more
people around here that would occassionally sit down and do things
in that fashion.

-Robin

-- 
http://singinst.org/ :  Our last, best hope for a fantastic future.
Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot
is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false"
is "na nei".   My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/

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