Subject: Re: [lojban] presentation of lojban

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2001 02:17:30 -0500

At 05:05 PM 11/23/01 -0500, Rob Speer wrote:
>On Fri, Nov 23, 2001 at 04:30:19PM -0500, [email-masked] wrote:
> > I would downplay our
> > community -- by the time it was 45, Esperanto had several million 
> relatively
> > competent speakers and a library of several hundred (perhaps thousand) 
> books;
> > even if you put Lojbans age at 10 or so, Esperanto -- with only the
> > international snail mail of the end of the 19th century -- had many 
> times our
> > number of competent speakers and dozens of books.
>
>On that end, I think we need either an update of lojban.org or a new
>site that we can point people interested in Lojban to - someone coming
>across the web page now would get the impression that nothing has been done
>with the language for a year, and if they persist in being interested,
>they're directed to various aging web sites and old texts. It's a wonder
>anyone at all shows up on lojban-beginners, because I haven't seen it
>publicized _anywhere_.

Lojban has not been publicized anywhere, in part because we have been so 
poor on follow-through to anyone who responds, except to sell them a book 
and/or point them to the list. We have not had a usable introductory 
packet since 1993, and Nick's brochure update is to be the replacement for 
that, at the publication of which we may be more able to deal with 
significant new queries about the language.

As for the web page, we have been working on a turnover of web page 
management to Robin Powell, who will also be hosting the site. Once that 
transfer is done, and it could take place literally at any moment because 
the CAIS people have been requested to make the change, Robin will then be 
making some changes and enhancements, one of which will surely be to make 
sure the page changes often enough that no one asks why it never changes.

Unfortunately, my coming from the pre-Internet generation, I have not 
had the creativity nor even the understanding to fathom why the main page 
would be expected to change frequently when the language is now baselined 
and not changing, and when we have few new products. Instead, I put the 
link to Evguenie Sklyanin's links page, which DOES change often and which 
points to the variety of other pages that also change, and the link to the 
Web ring that also links to key sites that change, and hoped that this 
would do. Alas it hasn't been enough, and I am happy to turn over the job 
of making the pages interesting, while preserving their primary archival 
function, to Robin.

>If we had a way to show people where stuff is going on - the text
>repository on digitalkingdom, the IRC channels, the "Lojban for
>Beginners" draft, the Wiki, and of course the mailing lists - I think we
>could increase the size of the community drastically.

One we get the new brochure book done, which of course will be after Nick 
gets resettled in Australia, we will probably be ready to do 
something. Finances remain extremely tight, so we cannot print-publish 
both of Nick's books at once, but getting the brochure done will give us a 
shot to grow a market that will finally pay off the remaining printing debt 
from the reference grammar. Then, after his lesson book is published, we 
will more seriously resume efforts on some sort of dictionary publication.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org