[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [lojban] Growth and decline in lojbanistan



On 9/15/2014 8:49 PM, mukti wrote:
On Sunday, September 14, 2014 5:53:33 AM UTC-3, And Rosta wrote:

    /What and where are these historical studies? Was 2003 the
    historical peak?/

gleki was referring to some informal research I've discussed in IRC.
I've tried to measure lojbanic activity over time by looking at things
like the number of messages in the mailing lists and the number of
members of LLG.

Mailing list activity seems to have peaked in 2001-2002: The combined
number of messages in "lojban" and "jboske" topped 7,500 during those
years. 2003 was the year that LLG reached peak membership (36). Mailing
list activity declined, but a lot of activity was diverted to the phpBB
forum supporting the newly formed BPFK.

The years after 2003 saw a steep decline in all of these measurements,
bottoming out in 2008 (2,100 messages in "lojban" and
"lojban-beginners", less than 30% of peak activity) and 2009 (17 LLG
members, less than 50% of peak membership).

Because of the sudden decline -- 2004 mailing list activity was about
50% of the previous year -- I've been tempted to read 2003 as the
critical year, and to look for clues that year as to what happened: What
contributed to the rapid growth in previous years, and how was that
growth reversed so quickly?

It looks to me like the adoption of the baseline policy 2002 -- and the
consequent failure of BPFK to fullfill its expectations despite heroic
efforts by both chairs -- is where the wheels came off the bus. Which is
why I would like to bring proposals to the Annual Meeting to determine
whether specific terms of the baseline policy are still aligned with the
values and the experience of the community, or whether there's another
way forward.

I'd be interested to hear from those who were around throughout the
2000s: What, from your perspective, happened? And what lessons can be
drawn for the future?

I think that there were a couple of other factors. The short version of all the following is that the modern Internet made a whole bunch of new forms of activity possible, and Lojbanists turned to those new forms and away from the mailing list. At the same time, we had a major change of leadership, and the creation of the BFPK absorbed an enormous amount of attention and focus by key people for a critical period of time.

The splitting into multiple mailing lists possibly removed critical mass from Lojban List. I think the disjointness of the various independent activities was the major cause of reduced list traffic.

The rise of IRC meant that the Lojban List wasn't necessarily the best single place to post, and it was the most active Lojbanists that "disappeared" to IRC. The much discussed rise of xorlo came about primarily through off-list activity

The rise of the tiki/wiki format for Lojban web pages again gave a new outlet for (especially experienced) Lojbanists other than the mailing list.

In addition, I think that there was a turn towards translation of larger works that started with xorxes work on Alice. The mailing list was less a place to work with others on such larger efforts.

There was a major change of leadership, as I stopped leading, and my wife almost totally stopped Lojban activity. John Cowan had greatly reduced his leadership activity after CLL was published, for multiple reasons. Nick Nicholas dropped out soon after, also for multiple reasons. The new leadership wasn't focused on "leading" the entire community so much as getting major accomplishments done, and they were communicating much more through back-channels than on the mailing list. My leadership, on the other hand, had been conducted almost entirely on the mailing list.

Another significant change, which started before 2003, but increased rapidly at that point, was a rapid increase of international Lojbanists.

The 2008-ish rebirth is probably significantly due to the work of Matt Arnold, at first on his own and later as President of LLG. He brought attention to current Lojban activities to the home page, and also talked up Lojban a lot on the mailing list, encouraged a rebirth of regular LogFests which had suffered when I no longer hosted them (and LogFest was no longer associated with the annual meeting. Matt did a lot of good stuff for the community (His focus was not on LLG as an organization).

At about the same time, we figured out how to use amazon.com to sell CLLs and have them do most of the order fulfillment. We've since gone from selling 25 copies of CLL a year to perhaps 125. That fueled considerably more rapid growth in the community, and enormously cut the overhead of time spent filling orders.

lojbab

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.