Subject: And, continued

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 02:03:31 +1100

Not responding to Bob, and I do insist that And is being misconstrued 
here. But as to BPFK policy making (as distinct from baseline policy):

>> Nick
>> felt that we needed the community to buy into the byfy process 
>> explicitly
>> in order that it be kicked off with serious intent to get it done, as
>> opposed to the 10+ years that I've let the existing dictionary effort 
>> drag,
>> so we ASKED for a mandate I think Nick is quite right to do this. 
>> Leading the BP will be a hard
> enough job without the added hassle of being accused of bulldozing
> the community against its wishes. And the work of the BP will be much
> smoother when everybody knows it's what everybody wants. Nick has
> indicated that the BP's terms of reference are negotiable; I take it
> that if in the process of carrying out the BP's tasks it turns out
> that his initial principles are more of a hindrance than a help, they
> can be revised. This satisfiers me, personally.

I insisted, because as I've said elsewhere, this is too important an 
issue to be left to board fiat. I would be cool with a general meeting 
(as long as it was strictly time-limited), but this may or may not 
happen.

There are many things I'm prepared to negotiate and compromise on in 
the BP. There are some gradient conditions where, beyond a certain 
point, I decide I can no longer work. That includes routine lack of 
consensus, excess revisionism, demonisation of opponents, ignoring 
logical criteria completely, treating prior usage cavalierly, and talk 
of cabals. This doesn't mean the BPFK cannot continue past that point; 
it means I can't.

I am prepared to compromise lots. Not all, but lots. I believe the same 
of you. And if the procedures turn out not to work, then yes, we 
revisit them. The point is not the procedures, but their goal: 
expeditious completion of the task.

And did the right thing in posting a consensus document; he rushed the 
consensusiness of it (John clearly did not accept it), but it's the 
kind of thing that needs to happen from now on. Even with minority 
reports. Let's not cast aspersions on how jboske debates drag on, and 
whose fault it is, and people's bona fides. Let's just try and make 
sure that the debates from now on don't drag on more than they need to, 
and that they have discernible ends.

(Which means I should have piped up on the outstanding issues in 
jboske. But I am overcommitted right now, even with just Lojban things. 
And the four days it took me to beat the pdf of the Level0 booklet into 
submission did not help... Sometimes, one needs to let the others 
decide, and lump it, whatever they come up with. Sometimes, one needs 
to stand one's ground too, even if belatedly; but clearly things will 
get done if the former is the default, rather than the latter.)

-------------------- 
=================================----------------------
Dr Nick Nicholas. Unimelb, Aus. [email-masked]; 
www.opoudjis.net
"Electronic editors have to live in hope: hope that the long-awaited
standards for encoding texts for the computer will arrive; hope that 
they
will be workable; hope that software will appear to handle these texts;
hope that all the scholars of the world will have computers which can
drive the software (which does not yet exist) to handle the texts (which
have not yet been made) encoded in standard computer markup (which has 
not
yet been devised). To hope for all this requires a considerable belief 
in
the inevitability of progress and in the essential goodness of mankind."
(Peter M.W. 
Robinson)