Subject: RE: [lojban] Why we should cancel the vote or all vote NO (was

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Dec 2002 19:51:17 -0500

And:
> > >As it is, the issue of a general mandate for a commission to set to
> > >work to get the dictionary written, which surely would be less
> > >contentious, is mixed up with a load of other more controversial stuff
> > >(both in the Board Policy & Nick's BF manifesto)
> >
> > The controversial stuff must be dealt with, or the dictionary is a wasted
> > effort. The byfy must have strong leadership and move towards a decisive
> > goal, or it won't get done, and will turn into a manifestation of the
> > endless jboske debates
>
>The blame for the endlessness of the jboske debates can be laid at
>your door to a considerable extent. Nobody had any mandate to resolve
>anything; you insisted that "let usage decide" was the only mechanism
>for resolving anything; and until Jay unilaterally set up the wiki
>we had no decent mechanism for keeping records.

But neither jboske or the wiki is "usage deciding". "Usage deciding" will 
be found only in the corpus.

> > (And I daresay that you are guilty of doing precisely what you object to
> > from us - at one point recently taking a jboske debate and apparently
> > presuming that everyone who did not explicitly object supported your
> > "consensus" written up on the wiki, when jboske itself is only a subset of
> > the community.)
>
>That consensus represents a consensus of all who participated in the
>debate.

I didn't read that closely, but my impression was that it was YOUR 
perception of what all who participated in the debate felt, and that some 
of those who you claimed agreed, did not in fact agree.

The better way would have been to post your perceived agreement, and ask 
those in the debates to sign it if they agreed. I think that is more or 
less what Nick has in mind for procedural voting of the byfy (not having 
read his wiki page yet).

>I posted a draft text that attempted to encapsulate what I
>saw as the consensus that emerged, and I revised it in the light of
>comment.

Perhaps you did. I haven't been paying attention. At the time, you 
appeared to claim that specific people supported the consensus before they 
had in fact agreed with what you had written. I didn't say anything since 
I wasn't one of them, and we were discussing the very same thing in the 
byfy, and I didn't want to confuse the issue by referencing one without the 
other.

> Anybody who wanted their voice to be heard in forming that
>final statement had the opportunity. I accept that some people might
>have been too busy to voice their opinions, and if they voiced their
>opinions at a later date, and if the consensus hadn't been made official
>by that point, then I would be prepared to reopen the debate and
>rewrite the summary document if necessary. As it is, that wiki page
>is a milestone in resolving jboske debate and turning it into a
>form accessible to people who are interested only in the final outcomes
>of jboske debate and not its processes.
>
>In other words, what I did is exactly what you should have done,
>and certainly not what you did do.

Since I have never been interested in that sort of process, that is in fact 
not something that I "should have done". Nick has the willingness to do 
that; I don't.

Cowan's Elephant was the prior version of attempting to record and resolve 
debates. Unfortunately, it apparently fits the name too well - it became 
an Elephant defined by a committee, having so many extra features and 
appendages that it never got done. But if it had gotten done, I wouldn't 
have been the one working on it. If you think this is my failing, well you 
may be right; I don't have the stamina for that sort of discussion on each 
word of the language, nor the training in logic and semantics, nor the 
personality that would allow me to do that AND my main job of leading the 
community (and my appointed job of business manager).

>I expect that a consensus on the BP's methods will evolve as the BP
>begins its work. I have faith in Nick as the best possible person to
>lead the effort.

So do I. The main delay in selecting him is that he was repeatedly begging 
to reduce his Lojban commitments, so we spent a while debating other 
possible leaders before Nick finally realized that he was the one we needed 
and that he really loves us enough to squander a couple of years of his 
career on our behalf %^)

>This thread began by me asking whether we were being asked to vote
>on the broad thrust of the new policy -- that there be a BF -- or
>the whole caboodle. You wouldn't answer. If you'd said "we're just
>trying to establish whether there is a mandate for the BF to exist",
>then I'd have just voted Yes and said no more.

Well there is more to the policy than that. If you had made it clear that 
you were concerned about the details of the byfy operation, rather than 
anything actually in the policy statement itself, I could have answered 
you. But you said "details of the policy", and I presumed you meant 
details that were in the statement, not the ones that weren't.

(Maybe someone can find SWH significance in THAT %^)

> > LLG wasn't organized as a community town meeting. Maybe you think it
> > should be, but it wasn't, and indeed it might not be possible under the
> > laws of this state to do so - we're required to have a fixed and legally
> > responsible Board of Directors, which I have to annually report to the
> > state in order to keep our charter
>
>I find it hard to believe that state law prohibits the Board from
>soliciting the views of the community as a basis on which to formulate
>policy.

The Board originally met in emergency session because two Board members 
felt the situation sufficiently broken to not be left to fester until the 
next Members meeting. Once we called the meeting and got into the details, 
Nick was of the opinion that the mess was even worse than originally 
thought. But the general feeling at the start was that we needed a 
decision quickly and that it would tide us over. It was only when we had 
decided on the byfy, and Nick felt that he needed a mandate that was 
stronger (and that mandate cannot merely be a tide-over until the members' 
meeting) that the policy statement became something worthy of a larger 
commitment. Before that, IMHO, the real decision needing community input 
would have been the one to adopt the final baseline. But Nick wants the 
advance commitment from people that they will back the byfy and its results 
before it spends (wastes?) copious time determining those results, and THAT 
is something that the community, or rather each person in the community, 
has to decide for themselves.

> > >The only thing that causes me to lack confidence in the Board is its
> > >failure to consult the membership in formulating policy
> >
> > The Board's job is to act on matters in between members' 
> meetings. Thus it
> > is our JOB to not wait for consultation with the membership
>
>Doesn't consultation count as action?

When immediate action is perceived necessary, as it was (or we would not 
have had the Board meeting), then "consultation" does not seem 
practical. Besides: look at what the list and member-list traffic was like 
at the end of August and tell me that you think a consultative debate was 
practical. When traffic is running in the dozens of messages per day 
range, NO ONE wants to introduce a new topic to make things worse.

>And are major long-term policy
>decisions the sort of action appropriate for the Board in between
>members' meetings?

If necessary. But we are always accountable to the members.

> > Meanwhile this vote is PRECISELY THAT, a consultation.
>
>Of the minimal sort granted to electors in the democracies. The
>politicians concoct their rafts of policies and the electorate get
>to accept or reject the entire reft.

Yep. And it has led to some of the most stable forms of government in 
history. I for one find this a good thing.

> > It is a
> > consultation after the decision, because if we had consulted before the
> > decision, there never would have been a decision. Now we have a decision
> > that will stand or fall, and which if not supported will be modified by 
> the
> > membership next meeting. That is precisely the way the organization is
> > officially supposed to work. You will note that in addition, we modified
> > the annual meeting provisions so that the larger portion of the membership
> > will actually be able to participate in that meeting. You don't have to
> > fly to Virginia to have your say (though you may have to stay up late at
> > night %^)
>
>I was very pleased by that decision to allow 'global attendance', and
>I had the general impression that the Board was more actively responding
>to members' requests than has hitherto been customary.

No member had asked for it before. We call for agenda items every year, 
and no one says a word. In this case Robin and xod introduced several new 
ideas at the members meeting that had never been discussed on the mailing 
list (they may have been discussed on IRC, but I don't see that 
discussion). Then new things (changing the nature of LogFest) were 
introduced in the members list AFTER the meeting which I wish had been 
brought up during the meeting, or preferably in advance, so that we could 
have discussed it with the non-attending people beforehand. Once the 
members meeting is over, the Board is stuck with decision-making until the 
next year's member meeting. (And until we actually changed the policy, we 
had to respect the members who are not on-line.)

> > The debate must be limited or nothing will get done. But the details are
> > internal to the byfy.
>
>My view is that the debate must go on long enough for all arguments
>and counterarguments to be raised.

We couldn't wait that long, and we cannot do so. That is why there is a 
time limit on the vote too. The old policy was sufficiently broken and 
self-contradictory (and out of touch with what people were doing) as to not 
be a policy at all, and given the solidity with which our approach is tied 
to a baseline, we can't operate without a baseline policy.

That multipage policy would have been a 2 paragraph document at the 
beginning of the Board meeting, and perhaps people would have felt it not 
worthy of objecting to. It was only when we got into the nitty gritty that 
the issue became complex and the solution did as well (around a half dozen 
agenda items, most of them added after the meeting started, ended up being 
resolved in that one statement).

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