coi ro do
OPEN ALPHA: A first (public) version of the submission tool
is online. Anyone wanting to be a tester can register at
lojban-submission.sukender.net .
I will welcome any feedback to help improving it: content,
features, issues, etc...
Notes:
- For now, registering requires administrator approval;
this restriction should be removed later. Please be
patient after registration! I'll answer as soon as
possible.
- Site has multi-language support (3 languages for now...)
and will try to satisfy your browser's language list. You
may change the language whenever you want (there's a
language switcher on pages). Please prefer registering
your account details in English (switch language for that,
if required) so that everyone can understand. Else, you
should think about translating your account details in
English after registration.
Thanks for your help!
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