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Re: [lojban] the future of Lojban's leadership

On 5/17/2014 3:35 AM, la durka wrote:

I have a problem with dismissing Facebook and IRC out of hand, because
that's a large portion of the Lojban-speaking community.
I'm not sure how you know that. I've not seen any useful measures of the size of the community of late. When I visit the IRC channel, I see several dozen tags supposedly logged in, but at most a couple of people respond when I say something, so I'm not sure those tags are real people. There are several groups that come up when I search for Lojban on Facebook. The largest in terms of members seems to be run by gleki - there are 1353 members but a large percentage of those were added by gleki or someone else, so we really have no way of knowing if those people are all participating (I am not, since my limited Facebook activity is strictly for my family; I've intended to set up a separate Lojban-related account, but I simply don't have time for it, even if I had a clue how to make good use of social media).
There is a Lojban language page which says that 1071 "like" the topic and 2400 "speak" the language, and that is apparently those who have actually said that they speak Lojban, and another Lojban "product" page that 310 like. And a lojban community page with 78 who "like" it. I also see Swedish and Brazilian groups, and have heard that there are several other such groups.
And how many of those 1353 actually have said that they support this proposal? Your github summary says 21 to 1. 22 people is NOT a large portion of the community. 


And if nothing else, the
present "unofficial community motion" (or whatever it should be called), and
the amount of support it's seen, including from some LLG members, has shown
that there is a lot of will among Lojbanists for things to move forward.
Of course there is will for things to move forward. That has been true for years. What there isn't are workers willing to work as part of a team to move forward on the tasks that team leaders need them to do. Everyone wants to do their own thing in their own way, and as a result the usefulness of any particular effort is accidental.
selpa'i has NOT shown any particular willingness to be a team worker in the past, and has been rather quick to make and/or adopt proposals based on his/her own standards. Anyone who is leading the standardization among other things has to NOT be someone who is pushing their own proposals to change the existing standard. Standards necessarily are conservative or they aren't really standards. 


I admit to not really knowing what's been going on in the LLG recently
(in fact
I can't be the only one who wasn't even aware the meeting was going on).
If you were a voting member, you would have known. There is a members mailing-list and all members are subscribed to it as a matter of requirement.
Non-members can also participate, but they need to ask, in order to be added to the list. Anyone who reads the Bylaws, so that they know the responsibilities thereof, and who decides that they want to serve can ask to become a formal member. Rarely is someone who asks, and then shows up at the next meeting (i.e indicates their presence when asked in the mailing list) gets turned away.
The last (2013) meeting was not well-publicized because it had been delayed beyond reason (i.e it hadn't started before 2014), in part by my own distractions. The next annual meeting should be late this summer, and I'll try to better publicize it among the general community - which generally means the Lojban and Lojban-beginners mailing list, since I have no idea how to use other means. 


Part of this is the minutes not being published of course.
Another problem we have is that no one wants to take the time to write up minutes. Robin considers the mailing list archive to itself be the "minutes" 



Anyway a few things are clear. Everyone wants a bright future for
Lojban, and
agrees that there is work to do to make the language specification adequate.
That is the BPFK's responsibility, but the BPFK has been stalled for a long
time (and some have pointed to the existing mechanisms, but they are
demonstrably not working).
There is almost no one actually doing any work on BPFK stuff. Everybody is doing their own thing, so nothing gets done on the group effort. 


Maybe it is time to change the structure, not in
order to change the ideals, but in order to get things moving faster towards
those ideals.


The structure has changed several times, to no avail.
No structure will improve anything unless people start doing the required work, and completing it.
Right now, the highest priority is getting a revised CLL including NO changes to the language, only typos and errata that have been discovered since the 1997 publication. After that is done (and formatted for possible publication, since we are down to fewer than 150 copies of the 1st edition), xorlo will be the first modification to that baseline CLL, since it is the only approved language change so far.
dotside would likely be the second change considered, due to wide support and a relative lack of interaction with other features. Someone would need to write change pages for CLL to reflect that proposal for it to actually be added to the book before 2nd edition.
Then there are the raft of BPFK sections that need to be completed, as others have pointed out. They have to be provisionally voted on once completed.
When ALL BPFK sections are completed, the whole needs to be voted on as a new language baseline. Since the baseline document for the grammar and cmavo is CLL (absent a published dictionary), anything in the approved BPFK pages that requires a change to CLL needs to be turned into change pages. No sense in doing that until the BPFK pages are themselves approved in isolation.
Call this CLL 2.5 edition, and will constitute adequate documentation of the current language baseline.
Either CLL 2 or CLL 2.5 will presumably see print as the next edition before the current print stock runs out, probably before the end of 2015, and perhaps much sooner.
This then will form a new CLL baseline standard. Only then can formal changes to the baseline properly be considered, and they should be written in both BPFK page format and as CLL change pages in order to be properly considered. But that cannot be done until 2.5 is done, because you don't know what you are trying to change. 


Some people have said, what exactly are we proposing here? It's a good
question. To put it one way, we're simply trying to coalesce around
selpa'i and unstick the development of Lojban from the current gridlock.
The gridlock is stuck solely because the community has proven unwilling to do the work necessary to properly document the baseline, and has left the job in the hands of Robin or whichever other individual has been willing to put his name in (and demonstrate their commitment by actually working on said baseline - which so far as I know, selpa'i has not). 

We don't need a "caretaker" who isn't willing to do the work.


- A new committee takes on the task of finishing the language documentation,


Do it, and then we'll talk.


   and discussing + approving/rejecting (by vote or consensus) any further
   change proposals.


Not on the agenda until the existing language is documented.


Presumably, the active members of the BPFK would join this committee.
There are no "active members", per se. If there were, there would be activity. 


- We put selpa'i at the head of this committee.
Why selpa'i? I have seen no demonstrated qualifications comparable to Robin, and Nick Nicholas before him. (I haven't taken the BPFK jatna job myself because I haven't consistently put in the time actually working. If all that were needed were an adjudicator or caretaker, I would claim that I myself am as qualified as anyone.) 


Someone needs to have the power to resolve disputes
Robin has that power currently, and is far more qualified than anyone else, both on the basis of demonstrated language skill and commitment to the baseline process.
But there should be no disputes. (He hasn't hardly had to resolve any in several years). Just do the work. 

 and selpa'i/Miles has the will and skill to do it
He hasn't done the work, and whether you think he has the will or the skill, he has demonstrated neither to the people who have been responsible for the language up until now. 


(oops,
   didn't mean to rhyme there). Of course, someone chosen by the
community can
   always be removed by the same community in the unlikely event that
they fail
   to do a good job.
"The community" has no basis to choose except through LLG; there is no other entity that purports to represent the community. Someone could form a splinter organization, but they would have trouble proving that they represent "the community". The various official Lojban mailing lists are at this point the means whereby LLG communicates with the rest of the community, though the IRC channel has served as an informal means- but there are too few actually participating in IRC discussions at any one time. 


- The language development is organized as much as possible like a software
   project.
Been there, done that. We're in the software documentation phase, the part that the programmers never like to do, and try to get out of doing as much as possible. The whole concept of "baselines" used with Lojban comes from the configuration management aspect of formal software development (from the pre-Internet era, which is when I did my 15 years in the field - my wife still programs, doing maintenance of production applications, and their configuration management is even tighter than I worked under).
And while it is sometimes possible to work on the next phase of a software development before this one is finished, it generally is wasteful if not fruitless to do so when the specification is incomplete, which it necessarily is for Lojban until we have the current situation documented. 


There's an issue tracker so that discussions can be had about
   multiple issues at the same time,
Discussions other than as needed to get the existing language documented are not part of the job. We can't and won't stop people from talking about their pet language proposals, but only the commitment to consider none of them before the language is documented offers even the possibility of the latter occurring. 


yet in an organized fashion, and the
   important bits (definitions, grammar rules, etc) are in a repository.


The byfy pages serve that now.


   some kind of source control (Github? eh?)
Some people have a clue what github is. I don't. I think Robin has used it for configuration management of group translation efforts. But I work offline, usually in face-to-face discussion with my wife, and find web-based work incomprehensible (editing a tiki page is my limit in online skill) 


- Everyone is encouraged to contribute to the language documentation and
   development.
That is the case now. Look how much is NOT being done. Start doing it, and your voice will carry more weight as to HOW to be doing it. 

 Contributions have to be approved by the aforementioned

committee.
   Membership on the committee would be decided by the committee
(ultimately by
   selpa'i, I guess)
What makes him/her qualified, as opposed to the people currently on the BPFK (which selpa'i could also be on if s/he were doing some work). 

And why are you speaking for selpa'i rather than selpa'i?


based on the strength of one's contributions and demonstrated skill in Lojban.\


We're waiting to see the contributions.
From what little I know, selpa'i has been more involved in TLI Loglan (which named selpa'i a member of their "Loglan academy") than in Lojban during the last year. 


The idea is to keep bureaucracy to an absolute minimum, but to provide a
platform and organizational process that will work (better than the BPFK has
worked thus far) to move Lojban forward.
The only failing with the existing BPFK is that no one is willing to do the work, and stick with a task until completion. 


So, to conclude, there seem to be plenty of people who want progress and
some
inertia behind it. I've presented one possible model. What's the best way to
work with the LLG so that such a thing can be considered?
Work on the existing documentation tasks, completing one of which de facto makes one an "active member of the BPFK". If a few people were to do this, the process would become unstuck and people would find that there is no need for any new group. 

lojbab

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