At the 2013 annual meeting, lojbab called attention to a distance that has grown up between LLG as an organization and the lojban-using community. He noted, for example, that no new members have been added for several years. He asked members to consider, for discussion at the 2014 annual meeting, what steps might be taken to promote the future of the organization.
In the course of studying lojban and reading up on its history, I've come up with some ideas for rebuilding and reinforcing the bonds between LLG and the community it serves, thereby improving its prospects. There are a few broad themes:
Before I present my proposals, I'd like to define the problems they are intended to address.
Members of LLG may not be aware of the extent to which the organization has become opaque, especially in recent years and especially to non-members.
Non-members haven't been advised of the dates of annual meetings since 2010. Since that time, the date of the annual meeting has only been announced on the members-only "llg-members" mailing list. (During this period, there was actually an announcement on the "lojban" list that the 2012 annual meeting would soon be announced. But the announcement of the meeting itself, appeared exclusively on "llg-members".)
The announcement of the annual meeting is traditionally accompanied by a call for new members. Since for the last few years that call has only been received by those already confirmed as members, and since the annual meeting is traditionally where new members are confirmed, the fact that there have been few recruits should not surprise.
Aside from being unannounced, the proceedings of recent meetings have been invisible outside of the membership. Prior to a few months ago, no summaries or minutes had been published since the 2009 meeting.
Sometime prior to 2010, a decision was taken to recognize the email list archives as satisfying the legal requirement for minutes. As a result, members could consult the archives for unsummarized meetings and reports which may not have been included in minutes. But at some point the archives were truncated such that they only go back to 2011. As a result, there is currently no accessible record for members or non-members of important proceedings such as the 2008 and 2010 annual meetings, and documents such as the first BPFK report, as provided to the 2003 annual meeting, have fallen into obscurity.
According to the bylaws, the minutes of Board meetings are also are to be kept in "appropriate books". Minutes were published for Board meetings in 2001 and 2002 (first and second meeting), but for no other meetings. While a public record of proceedings may not be strictly required, I'd like to submit that the general membership as well as the lojban-using community at large has an interest in the proceedings of the Board, and that this interest is not well served by the lack of transparency.
As an example of how the lack of visibility of Board proceedings has affected activities outside of the Board, a 2003 rumor of pending Board intervention into the work of the BPFK brought the business of that committee to a standstill only months after the BPFK had been called to order. Some members of the committee were able to read the discussion on the "llg-board" mailing list, while others could not, and Board members refrained for several months from making a public statement of their objections and intentions.
Now I'd like to turn from discussing the records and communications of LLG, to a review of its official activities and productions.
Many of LLG's enduring accomplishments were achieved long before a policy defining "official projects" was adopted at the 2002 annual meeting. But the record of completed official projects since that time is short indeed. Of the forty-something projects officially adopted at the 2003 annual meeting, few are recognizable as either continuing efforts or as having reached some kind of conclusion. Only a fraction seem to have ever met their quarterly reporting requirements, and none appear to have issued any reports since 2006. It's not clear whether any new projects have been commissioned or decommissioned since that time.
There are success stories, particularly among software-related efforts. The "Lojban parser" project yielded camxes, which is now implemented in multiple programming languages. The "jbovlaste" project sealed the recognition of that institution. And the "lojban.org maintenance group" and "lojban wiki" projects continue to provide Internet hubs to the lojban-using community. Robin Lee Powell has been a central figure in each of these efforts.
Among non-software projects, xorxes' translation of "Alice in Wonderland" is a standout as an official project that hit its target.
But the decline of LLG's official productions owes less to the 2002 policy on projects than to a series of missteps which complicated the follow-up to LLG's most ambitious and successful project: The landmark publication of "The Complete Lojban Language" by John Cowan. The completion of the long-awaited reference grammar was accompanied by the declaration of the baseline, announced January 10, 1997, and headlined, "THE LOGLAN/LOJBAN LANGUAGE DESIGN is considered COMPLETE".
Unfortunately, this triumph was soon undone. The fine print made a subtle but enormously consequential distinction between the "design" of the language and what was called the "definition". The design was said to be complete, but without a "baseline description document" for the lexicon -- the gismu, cmavo and lujvo lists were disqualified as "preliminary forms" of the dictionary -- recognition of the baseline "language definition" was suspended for six months. At the 1997 annual meeting, the suspension was extended for an additional four months, "or a date deemed reasonable by the Board of Directors". No announcement was made following the October 31, 1997 deadline. If the Board took action at that time, it was not publicized.
In the years that followed, it proved difficult to define or describe a design which had been deemed complete despite the absence of a complete definition or description. The terms of the "design freeze", whereby the incompletely described design could not be amended, compounded this difficulty. Finding the community "unwilling or unable to work on completing the documentation of a baseline lexicon under freeze conditions", the Board drafted the "Official Baseline Statement" of 2002 and submitted it to the community for an up-or-down vote.
The 2002 "Baseline Statement", once approved, rolled back the 1997 declarations of the baseline and the completion of the language design. It formed the BPFK under Nick Nicholas, providing it with a limited mandate to complete the language design under strict conditions.
It was projected that BPFK work would be completed by the time of annual meeting in 2003, at which point the resulting "final baseline" would be submitted to membership for ratification. The deadline was missed, and Nick soon resigned as chair in the midst of disagreements over the interpretation of the committee's order of business and the requirement for consensus-minus-one on all decisions. The Board appointed Robin Lee Powell as chair.
Despite initial progress in 2003-2004, reports of the BPFK over the following years were consistently grim: "near total lack of activity" (2005), "currently stuck" (2006), "lack of progress" (2007), "[nothing] of significance to report" (2009), "chair … not receiving any help" (2012), "nothing to report" (2013).
By way of comparison, the annual meeting minutes for both 2000 and 2001 -- before the introduction of the "Baseline Statement" -- had posted a similar report: "Production of dictionary: not advanced". The policy changed, but the results remained constant.
In his seventh year as chair of BPFK, Robin wrote an essay, "Lojban: You're Doing It Wrong," (2010) in which he opined that the 2002 baseline policy had done "incalculable damage" to lojban. The constraints of scope and process placed upon the BPFK made it unlikely to ever finish the job it was commissioned to do. He proposed divesting LLG of its authority to define the language, and investing that authority wholly in BPFK. [ Note: The essay may not reflect Robin's current opinion, and the use I make of it in this message should not be understood to express his opinions, past or present. ]
The essay and its proposals were met with wide approval. Matt Arnold, who was serving at the time as president of LLG, wrote "I agree with your essay in its entirety." But Matt resigned in the midst of the debate that followed, and the proposals were never formalized or voted upon.
Ironically, and in the absence of public records of annual meetings after 2009, the impression of one of the proposals took root without the proposal itself ever receiving actionable consideration. It became widely rumored that LLG had no business regarding the language itself, and was concerned only with legal and financial bookkeeping, to the extent that numerous lojbanists were dissuaded from applying for membership.
Little has changed since the 2010 essay. One can read it as if it were written yesterday: Only the optimism seems anachronistic. Robin stopped short of formalizing his proposals. I'd like to ask if there are volunteers to pick up where he left off: To formally eliminate the obstacles that are holding back LLG from effectively executing on its mission to promote and preserve lojban. To amend or replace policies which have long failed to live up to expectations. To reconnect LLG with the vibrant community that continues to build around this extraordinary language, lojban, and to set the institution on a new trajectory: One that will take us together into the future.
To this end, I submit the following outline of proposals, in anticipation of bringing those that receive support to the actionable consideration of the annual meeting of the membership. I hope that those who object to these suggestions, as well as those who find them agreeable, will make their thoughts known.
Thanks for your attention,
Riley Martinez-Lynch
mi'e la mukti mu'o
Outline of Proposals