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

On 9/5/2014 9:48 PM, And Rosta wrote:

Am I mistaken, or has nothing come of this proposal?


Correct.


Or is something coming of it, but after only four months not yet visibly?
I would not be surprised if the topic came up in the annual meeting, which I will be calling in the near future. But what was posted is both more and less than would be needed to seriously discuss such a proposal.
My suggestion would be, if the proponents of this proposal are still interested, that they draft a revised policy statement to replace the 2002 baseline statement. 


It would be interesting & welcome to see documented in one place a
vision (e.g. a consensus of Selpa'i and his interlocutors) of what
Lojban would potentially look like were the BPFK's work finished.
It is not clear to what extent selpa'i and his allies even accept the charter of BPFK. If they did, then Robin could accomplish much merely by informally delegating considerable authority to selpa'i, while retaining final authority on matters of policy. 

Following is my current thinking on the matter.


some extremely active and hard-working jbopre have,
over the
years, contributed many efforts to the language such as translations,
music but
also proposals of enhancements or refinements of various aspects of
the language
including its grammar, cmavo and general lexicon. However without an
active
leadership many of these modifications remain in conversational limbo
where they
are discussed for years in vain since there is no explicit mechanism for
integration into the language or lexicon. New speakers get confused at
the
apparent lack of consensus.
The above is probably the main factor under dispute - whether a bunch of unspecified "enhancements or refinements" are integrated into the language, more or less imposed by fiat, before the original byfy effort has been completed (and with some doubt as to whether it would be completed or not).
This in turn hinges on the question of whether Lojban is considered essentially DONE as an engineering effort, or whether the intent is to continue changing the language prescription indefinitely. We started Lojban in part as a rejection of JCB's plan to open-endedly continue language engineering, because every time a change is made, some number of people give up and turn away from learning and using the language. The language of the poster suggested an intent to continually evolve the language prescription (i.e impose evolutionary change by fiat into the indefinite future), rather than switching the effort to a descriptive one reflecting and somewhat lagging actual usage changes.
This of course is more or less the same "conservatives vs modifiers" debate that caused the original byfy effort to start to break down about the time xorlo was being discussed.
I should note, by contrast, if the issue were the formal approval of a specific set of modifications that are already agreed upon and in use by actual users of the language, and documented to the same level as the status quo language (ideally as a set of changes to CLL, while completing the existing baseline documentation), then I would expect some sort of consensus to be possible, probably along the same lines under which xorlo was made official (see Craig Daniel's post of 26 Aug, which I think pertains to this approach).
Otherwise, any substantial change would indeed be schismatic, in part because a lot of people like myself have absolutely no idea what changes they are talking about, and no real way to find out; a lot of people presume that the language is that which is described in CLL.
(The need for a new edition of CLL in about a year, when we expect to run out of the existing edition, is also a factor in all this. If changes are adopted and no new CLL edition is produced pretty much right away, then schism is inherent. Similarly, if a new CLL is produced, and yet additional changes continue to be made, schism still results. Only by having the language thoroughly and accurately described by CLL can we keep everyone "on the same page".) 

lojbab




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