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On 02/06/2018 03:22 PM,
sukender1@gmail.com wrote:
coi Since the initial announcement, I didn't see any comments on the mailing list on the proposal. Looking for possible explanations according to Warnock's dilemma, I can only infer that there is not much interest on the topic, unfortunately. I am at fault myself because I registered but did not experiment very much with the system until now, by I think a few comments are in order... First, I am really impressed at what you have created based on the original discussion and ideas. I can imagine the amount of work you did to get the site to the current level... If you have done it all by yourself in your spare time, I really envy your programming/web skills. Kudos! About the role that the site can have for the Lojban community, it is difficult to make a fair assessment because a tool to organize a community is something that presupposes an active, lively community that needs to be organized. Sadly, I observe that there is no such community at the moment, and there is not much that a tool can do to correct the situation. In the hypothetical case that an active community will spring to life, I would say that such a tool would work well and provide a lot of value if the community had a strong commitment to the organizational rules that are encoded in the tool. On the other hand, I am pessimistic that such commitment could be achieved in practice, and I have also some reservations on whether it would be actually desirable. To explain better, let's say the site provides these fundamental services (simplifying): 1. A submission/review/commenting system. 2. Management of roles and competences for the users of the system. 3. A workflow and approval system based on voting. My biggest concern is on point 3: in my experience I have never encountered a volunteer-based community that put such a strong emphasis on voting as a way to direct the project (I am comparing mainly to the innumerable small and large communities about open-source software and similar projects, which have the most similarities with Lojban). In fact, I consider it a sign of poor health if a community routinely resorts to voting. A healthy community should rarely need to vote. In my view voting stimulates competitive (as opposed to collaborative) behavior and usually obscures the need of having a well-defined vision, a limited scope and a coherent design around which consensus-based solutions can be found when issues arise. I see point 2 above (roles and competences) also as being somewhat dependent on point 3. It is in a sense a way to mitigate the possible shortcomings and manipulation opportunities of the voting system, while keeping the voting system itself in place. Is all this complication really needed? About point 1 (submission/review/comment), the system you built is very good. Taken by itself, though, it suffers from the competition of solutions that have been around a long time and that have explored this problem domain (think Github code reviews). Sorry if my assessment sounds a bit harsh, I might be biased from my past experiences. In any case, I hope Lojban can find a way to be better organized, whatever the organization will be... And in the end, you managed to give concrete form to the vision you had and build something useful basically from scratch, something that I would never have been able to do. So all respect is for you! TL;DR: The site is extremely well-done and could support a community that values voting and user roles as the basis of its organization, but I don't believe that Lojban should be such a community. Gregorio -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/lojban. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. |