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Re: [lojban] Revitalizing LLG: Suggestions for the 2014 annual meeting
On 8/17/2014 6:07 PM, mukti wrote:
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:
1. Restoring transparency to LLG as a institution
2. Revising LLG's commitments to better correspond with its resources
3. Removing the obstacles to officially documenting lojban as it is
used today
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.
Actually, I think it is just as opaque to the members, because most of
them only think about organization matters when we have a meeting. We
used to have a much more active discussion when the meetings were held
live (or later when they were on IRC). But the time differential (and
travel costs) Have made those options difficult.
Non-members haven't been advised of the dates of annual meetings since
2010 <http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Archived+News#9AUGUST2010>. Since that
time, the date of the annual meeting has only been announced on the
members-only "llg-members" mailing list.
This has been the fault of the President (which right now is me so mea
culpa; I'll try to do better this year). The real problem has been that
we've repeatedly delayed the meetings to the point where I just need to
get them started, so we can get the mandatory elections out of the way,
and notifying people has gone by the wayside.
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.
We had expected that the existing membership would be aware of anyone
who wanted to join, but that apparently is not the case.
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
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2009+Annual+Meeting+Minutes>.
Sometime prior to 2010, a decision was taken to recognize the email list
archives <http://mail.lojban.org/mailman/private/llg-members/> 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.
I can't help with most of this. Robin has made the decision to use the
list as minutes because he doesn't have time to do more. If someone is
willing to prepare a summary, they are encouraged to do so. But I do
have said report in my personal archives and it is appended to this message
According to the bylaws
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Bylaws+of+The+Logical+Language+Group%2C+Inc.>,
the minutes of Board meetings are also are to be kept in "appropriate
books".
They are supposed to be, but that item of the bylaws has more or less
been superseded with online meetings by the non-publication of minutes.
Minutes were published for Board meetings in 2001
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2001+Board+Meeting+Minutes> and 2002
(first <http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2002+Board+Meeting+Minutes> and
second meeting
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2002+Second+Board+Meeting+Minutes>), but
for no other meetings. While a public record of proceedings may not be
strictly required,
The "Board Meeting" per se is an ongoing thing that never ends. The
"minutes" as with the member's meeting consists of the mailing list
archive. Since the meeting never ends, there is no "set of minutes" for
the meeting that are approved and thus none to be published. We have
had to discuss issues that needed to be kept private, which is why the
list archive isn't open. I don't think that there is any easy way to
solve this, unless we get someone who wants to actually prepare minutes.
Robin again doesn't have time.
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.
Probably you are correct. But the Board for the most part hasn't been
doing much that is worth reporting. I'll try to see if I can include
something in the President's report next annual meeting.
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
<http://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=BPFK:_Old_Meta-BPFK_Forum> 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.
Probably because they didn't have any. I just looked through all of the
2003 board messages and find nothing that fits this topic. Nick was
making all the decisions until at the end of the year he found he did
not have enough time to continue. Having discussed various issues with
Robin, he resigned in Robin's favor. The board accepted the resignation
and appointed Robin, but the substance of Nick and Robin's changes were
not discussed by the Board. At no time did the Board question the
authority of the byfy jatna to decide how to run things. I think most
such discussion occurred in the referenced meta forum.
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 <http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2002+Annual+Meeting+Minutes>.
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
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2003+Annual+Meeting+Minutes>, few are
recognizable as either continuing efforts or as having reached some kind
of conclusion.
The bottom line problem is that very few people stick with a project
until it is completed, and few projects ever get more than 1-2 people
working on them. When I was actively working, I got things done myself,
and John Cowan also got a lot done, but if we weren't working on it, it
usually remained incomplete (Nick also completed things in the years
when he was active.)
We now have many more activities going on, but if they are ever
completed, no one tells me, and no one edits the project page to report
changes in status, and no one asks to be recognized as an official
project. LLG has become a much more decentralized organization. The
board decides very little, and the members' meetings not much more.
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.
If not listed, they haven't been. The bottom line is that the community
hasn't taken on the responsibility, and nothing will be reported unless
they do.
There are success stories, particularly among software-related efforts.
The "Lojban parser" project yielded camxes
<http://users.digitalkingdom.org/%7Erlpowell/hobbies/lojban/grammar/>,
which is now implemented in multiple programming languages. The
"jbovlaste <http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/>" 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.
Since he is the Secretary, as well as the web site manager, he
necessarily has to be. But you-all who participate in those efforts
know more of what he does in those arenas than the Board does.
Among non-software projects, xorxes' translation of "Alice in
Wonderland" <http://alis.lojban.org/> is a standout as an official
project that hit its target.
The original project was a group effort, but xorxes did most of it, and
I think afterwards went over the whole to ensure consistency.
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
<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/lojban/vMQ-GQsAJEA/Lbxj4agFykcJ>,
announced January 10, 1997, and headlined, "THE LOGLAN/LOJBAN LANGUAGE
DESIGN is considered COMPLETE".
Unfortunately, this triumph was soon undone.
Not really. I think that statement is still official policy.
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 <http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+1997+Annual+Meeting+Minutes>,
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.
There was in fact no action. Both Cowan and I were "burnt out" by the
effort to publish CLL, and lost our productivity in technical matters.
I got bogged down in order fulfillment, complicated by the discovery
that some 20% of the printed books were defective. Nora and I and a
couple others spent many days (weeks?) paging through many of the 1500
copies looking for further defects, until finally we got the printer to
take responsibility. Nick was inactive at that point, so basically
nothing technical got done for many months. (Cowan and I worked on an
automated method to generate a dictionary file, and eventually I
published the result. But that was still a couple steps short of being
a printed dictionary, because we had no good idea how to handle the cmavo.
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
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Official+Baseline+Statement> and submitted
it to the community for an up-or-down vote.
More or less accurate.
The 2002 "Baseline Statement", once approved, rolled back the 1997
declarations of the baseline and the completion of the language design.
No, it did not.
It formed the BPFK under Nick Nicholas, providing it with a limited
mandate to complete the language design under strict conditions.
The byfy was supposed to complete the language definition; the design
baseline still held. It was recognized that there were some errors in
CLL, and some questions unanswered. The byfy was empowered to answer
them. Following completions of the baseline definition (documenting the
existing baseline), the byfy would be empowered to consider some
changes. Eventually, after xorlo was documented and used by a subset of
the community, the membership voted to accept xorlo as documented as a
provisional change to the 1997 baseline. No other changes to the
baseline have yet been considered, much less approved, by the byfy or
the membership. (to the extent that the byfy documents include changes
to what is stated in CLL they may merely be proposals at this point).
It was projected that BPFK work would be completed by the time of annual
meeting in 2003,
We were eternally optimistic.
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.
Actually he officially resigned from lack of time because of his
academic commitments. But he was indeed frustrated because I and some
others refused to commit to consensus on things that were "changes"
until the whole was done. Still, he and Robin seemed pretty much in
agreement with what needed to be done. The problem was that few people
actually worked on getting the remaining sections done.
The Board appointed Robin Lee
Powell as chair
<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/lojban/KG-NXZbgmas/HjaYJ5njs58J>.
Despite initial progress in 2003-2004, reports of the BPFK over the
following years were consistently grim: "near total lack of activity
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2005+Annual+Meeting+Minutes>" (2005),
"currently stuck
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2006+Annual+Meeting+Minutes>" (2006),
"lack of progress
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2007+Annual+Meeting+Minutes>" (2007),
"[nothing] of significance to report
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2009+Annual+Meeting+Minutes>" (2009),
"chair … not receiving any help
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+Meeting+Summary+2012>" (2012), "nothing
to report <http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+Meeting+Summary+2013>" (2013).
By way of comparison, the annual meeting minutes for both 2000
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2000+Annual+Meeting+Minutes> and 2001
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/LLG+2001+Annual+Meeting+Minutes> -- 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.
No workers ==> no work done
In his seventh year as chair of BPFK, Robin wrote an essay, "Lojban:
You're Doing It Wrong
<http://teddyb.org/robin/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban%3A+You%27re+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. ]/
I'm not sure if that is correct, but it has been de facto reality all
along. LLG has the official authority to approve what BPFK comes up
with, (as well as the power to replace Robin), but there is zero
likelihood that the membership will reject what Robin comes up with. To
what extent BPFK will consider the consensus minus 1 standard to be
relevant is up to Robin.
It is possible that we will end up considering the CLL version 1.1 (with
corrections) and some set of words embedded in jbovlaste to be the
fulfillment of the 1997 baseline documentation, and then certain changes
will be accepted as baseline modifications in short order and a CLL 2.0
will be produced.
and the proposals were never formalized or voted upon.
I think that is correct, but it still amounts to Robin doing what he
decides, and the organization going along.
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.
Almost correct. LLG has assigned all business regarding the language
documentation to the byfy, and it is expected that the rump byfy will
retain that authority once the documentation is done, regarding any
future change 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.
A few people have actually been working on byfy sections in the last
couple of months, especially Ilmen and selpa'i. I don't know how much
remains to be done.
There is a time limit priority to finish some sort of update to CLL,
because we will likely run out of copies within the next year or so.
*Outline of Proposals*
1. Return to the former practice of announcing the annual meeting in
general interest forums, including the web site and the "lojban" and
"lojban-announcement" mailing lists.
This I intend to do, though I'm not sure who has authority to use the
announcement list.
2. Open the "llg-members" archives to the public.
That is up to Robin.
3. If possible, restore the pre-2011 "llg-members" archive, which
presumably includes important proceedings not recorded elsewhere
such as the 2008 and 2010 annual meetings.
Again, up to Robin.
4. Consider also opening the "llg-board" archives. If that is not
practical, adopt the practice of reporting minutes of Board
proceedings to the general membership.
There are no minutes. I will see if I can include some of this in my
President's report.
5. Reinforce the relationship of LLG to the lojban-using community by
instituting an annual honor for lojbanic achievement. Nominees could
be submitted by members and non-members in the weeks following the
announcement of the annual meeting, and then voted upon by the
membership at the annual meeting.
Sounds reasonable.
6. Either enforce the "official project" policy, amend it so that it
better reflects the available resources of project leaders and the
webmaster, or scrap it entirely. Revise the list of official
projects such that LLG only makes commitments that it has the
resources to honor.
LLG has no resources (other than a few thousand dollars in proceeds from
book sales that will likely go to publishing the next iteration). The
community has to decide which projects it wants to support, and then do
them.
7. Restore recognition to the 1997 baseline per the 1997 annual
meeting, including the lexicon documents as of October 31, 1997.
I think that recognition is the status quo. But the lexicon documents
are not considered sufficient.
8. Acknowledge that the lojban community has superfluously observed the
requirement for a five-year design freeze on the 1997 baseline. The
CLL, and gismu, cmavo and rafsi lists have now served for nearly
twenty years as the practical baseline of the language, whether or
not they were administratively entitled to that designation.
9. Start a conversation about the baseline-and-freeze approach. To what
extent has stability or the perception of stability of the baseline
affected the popularity or learnability of lojban? Have the benefits
of that approach outweighed the drawbacks? Is five years too long,
or not long enough? Is an absolute freeze necessary, or might a less
rigid approach work as well or better?
Once a new CLL version is done reflecting 1997 plus xorlo, BPFK will
decide on the changes to be incorporated into CLL 2.0 as well as what
will be a sufficient documentation of the lexicon.
10. Empower the BPFK to manage its own business, including the election
of committee members and officers, the order in which committee
business is considered, and the manner in which it is considered.
BPFK has this already, but with dictatorial power on such matters
vesting in the jatna. The Board/members have the power to replace the
jatna, (and possibly to modify what BPFK is intended to accomplish), but
realistically can only take what Robin passes to us, lacking anyone else
willing to undertake the commitment
11. Either invest unqualified design authority in the BPFK, or delegate
it in such a way that the BPFK can complete its work without undue
interference: Upon receiving a report from the BPFK, LLG membership
could vote on whether to accept its recommendations in whole or in
part, or to refer them back to the committee with comments.
That is how as I understand things are now, with the provision that some
sort of document of the status quo language will be approved before new
proposals will be considered.
If that is not what Robin intends, I'll probably be unhappy, but doubt
that my arguments will result in any official objection to his policies.
-------------
Here is Nick's 2003 report
Well. What to say about the BPFK.
The proposal for a baupla fuzykamni, a body to bring to completion the Lojban prescription and to fill in such gaps of definition of the language as are necessary for a dictionary to be written, arose out of discussions on the LLG board on how best to author such a dictionary, and on how to deal with ongoing disputes and uncertainties as to the language definition. The official announcement bringing it into being was November: http://www.lojban.org/llg/baseline.html .
I started work on the BPFK in February (after being distracted between November and January by a major discussion on jboske about Lojban gadri, which highlighted what the participants at least now believe to be a major weakness in the language.) In February, while I was in the States, I finalised with Robin Powell arrangements for the infrastructure of the BPFK, namely the Twiki (http://www.lojban.org/twiki/bin/view/BPFK/WebHome) and the phpbb discussion board (http://www.lojban.org/phpbb). I envisioned the phpbb as being the repository of formal discussion, and the Twiki as being the repository of record, and the venue for votes, with more openended discussion being diverted to jboske or the main wiki.
The other task that took me a while to complete (March) was a formal statement of guidelines as to how the BPFK should operate: http://www.lojban.org/twiki/bin/view/BPFK/GuidelinesForUsing . My concern throughout has been to place institutional safeguards in place to ensure the success of the BPFK mission as I see it: to allow efficient yet comprehensive review of existing identified problems in Lojban, with fair representation of all views, no compulsion of inordinate attention on the part of commissioners (a frequent problem with freer discussion, as amply demonstrated on jboske), and respect for the proclaimed backwards-compatibility and fulfilment of design criteria the BPFK has undertaken.
The BPFK started working through phpbb mid-April. As part of the division of labour, I have divided Lojban cmavo up into around 70 paradigms. Six paradigms have had commissioners volunteer as shepherds --- people who will coordinate discussion, keep records of findings, undertake authoring the summary of existing views and prescription, and make new proposals they see fit. In my opinion substantive matters for consideration have been raised for all six paradigms; two have essentially already seen descriptive records (including of past prescription and the status quo of usage). No formal votes have been posted on the twiki yet; see LeChevalier criticism below.
It was decided by the board that an ancillary to the BPFK, the vlatapla fuzykamni (VTPFK) be convened to resolve issues of Lojban morphology; this step was taken because morphology was not explicitly mentioned in the board statement. Nora Tansky LeChevalier is to chair the commission once she is released from her administrative duties. Pierre Abbat and Lionel Vidal have been continuing research into morphological issues.
There have been a number of criticisms of the setup and the functioning of the BPFK; some I accept, some I don't, though this is not the venue for me to make detailed comment on them. The issues worth bringing to the membership's attention are:
1. The guidelines are needlessly complex, and the split between twiki and phpbb is unnecessary but for the technical requirements of voting. (Powell). There are some grounds to this, and the role of the twiki seems to be limited to the (future) formal votes. Commissioners have appealed to the guidelines to police discussion; since the guidelines were intended to steer the BPFK in a specific direction following the board's statement, I regard that as positive.
2. Polls of a reformist bent on phpbb, even if of an informal nature, are counterproductive (Kominek vs. Rosta). My ruling (for now, anyway) is that polls on phpbb, being informal and with no binding consequence, are harmless. My big picture view, which may well be at variance from others and need to be curbed, is that my conservatism has nothing to fear from a vote, particularly given the current strenuous requirement of consensus-1.
That said, consensus-1 is a lot easier said than done:
3. The consensus-1 requirement makes it impossible for any change to happen, of whatever nature, and does not only exclude frivolous change (Daniel).
Conversely,
4. The BPFK has no business discussing any change until it first completes the task of documenting the entirety of the language; indeed, change as opposed to interpretation of the baseline is not the BPFK's task. Time must be spent to allow consensus to develop and trust to be established. As a result, votes should not be administered by shepherds, but only by the BPFKJ (baupla fuzykamni jatna -- me), and a time of my choosing --- much later than now. The shepherds should be preparing full diffs to CLL and other baseline documents, and a fully explicit formal proposal. Until the BPFK shows it does real work, it is becoming unproductive, and biassed towards railroading through changes. The current BPFK does not show indications that it is willing to reach consensus, and the BPFK needs to be more proactive in this regard. (R. LeChevalier).
These objections have arisen in the past week, and LeChevalier has not yet presented his criticisms on a public forum (although there was a sneak preview on jboske); they may significantly affect how the BPFK runs. (Then again, they may not.) So I'm afraid this report comes too early for a resolution to be reported.
The arguments between reformists and conservatives, both on and off the BPFK forum, have at times been as acrimonious as one would expect, and it is clear to me that much of my time will be spent, so to speak, channelling commissioners' energies into more productive outlets; I've been doing so already. I believe that I still have the confidence of commissioners that I will run the BPFK fairly and in the best interests of Lojban, as understood by the current disposition (see guidelines, board statement, etc.; best summarised, probably, as conservative formalist).
And I wish to emphasise that, although this disposition is biassed against reformists, the shepherds I think it is fair to characterise as reformist (Llambias and Daniel) have done a commendable job of documenting existing usage and highlighting issues for consideration in their paradigms. The shepherds have scrupulously been playing by the rules, and they have my full confidence; so does the composition of the commission and the guidelines, which I believe adequate to the task of keeping the BPFK on the track the board and membership have set for it.
Yes I'm being stuffy and high-falutin'. That's a reaction to the difficulties of the position. This is a hard job to carry through, and my metaphor of herding cats was not spoken idly. The next couple of weeks in particular will be rough, because I will be asking commissioners to consider whether the BPFK is going the right way, and how its operation might need to change.
.i ku'i le gugdrpolska punaijecanai ca'o te jinga
-------------------- =================================----------------------
Dr Nick Nicholas. Unimelb, Aus. nickn@unimelb.edu.au; www.opoudjis.net
"Electronic editors have to live in hope: hope that the long-awaited
standards for encoding texts for the computer will arrive; hope that they
will be workable; hope that software will appear to handle these texts;
hope that all the scholars of the world will have computers which can
drive the software (which does not yet exist) to handle the texts (which
have not yet been made) encoded in standard computer markup (which has not
yet been devised). To hope for all this requires a considerable belief in
the inevitability of progress and in the essential goodness of mankind."
(Peter M.W. Robinson)
And here is Nick's resignation, as submitted to the Board on 20 Oct
2003. It was officially accepted on the 27th, with Robin appointed to
replace him.
Dear Board,
as you'll have noticed, my Lojban time has been squeezed out in recent months, which means I am not currently able to perform my duties as BPFK chair. Compounded with this is of course the persistent sense of BPFK rudderlessness, that the duties expected of shepherds are too onerous, and that there is no clear sense of incremental direction for what the BPFK does. I have conferred with Robin on this, and we are in agreement that I should step down and Robin take over in the role of BPFK chair, which is to be regarded primarily as an administrative/gettings-things-done -- something Robin has demonstrably excelled at --- rather than linguistic/decision-making role.
I have discussed with Robin his ideas for getting the BPFK moving, including a notion of checkpoints, so that people can sense that concrete deliverables are emerging, and of a tiki-based, more flexible and open voting scheme, which allows votes to be revisited and not to be regarded as finally binding without general consent --- but binding enough that something is seen to be done. These have my approval, and are in the spirit of what I either wrote or should have written.
So. Discussion.
[ Nick Nicholas. French & Italian, Rm 637 Arts Centre, Univ. of Melbourne ]
[ nickn@unimelb.edu.au x44917 http://www.opoudjis.net ]
[ "There is no theory of language structure so ill-founded that it cannot ]
[ be the basis for some successful Machine Translation." --- Yorick Wilks ]
Neither the Board nor the membership, so far as I know, have questioned
any of Robin's positions as jatna.
I've argued with him at times on Lojban List, mostly because I didn't
understand his position clearly. But he has always satisfied me,
sufficiently that neither I nor others has felt the need to have the
membership or the Board amend any policy/.
lojbab
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