lo jboce'u selzukseltcuste pe la 2017 gregOriiys nanca

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This is an informal list of problems and possible solutions (and the accompanying considerations) compiled on behalf of the Lojban community by lai .krtisfranks. and submitted to the LLG in A.D. 2017.


Desires/Goals

  • Lojban community that does “lots of translations and projects and such”.
  • Develop a more active, less random arrangement of independent endeavors.
  • Need a place/way to inform others of such projects. Outreach is presently problematic.
  • Organize the main website better. Separate out official stuff from unofficial stuff. Possibly put things into each user’s personal space if it is unofficial.
  • Reduce learning curve for joining community
  • Build a tighter, more organized, more self-aware community
  • Develop goals for language exploration/projects.
  • Retain people
  • Sponsor certain works so that others may see them. Keep the styles, formats, difficulties, and lengths diverse. Experiencing other people’s works will encourage people to stay with it and to contribute themselves; having one’s work appreciated will encourage one to produce more and to stay involved.

Methods

  • Community round-up ( https://solpahi.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/monthly-lojban-community-roundup-january-2017/ )
    • Advertise it. Endorse it?
  • Place where people can volunteer in others’ projects.
    • Byline/motivational quote: “Most projects could be completed within a few days or weeks if every Lojbanist wrote one line of Lojban/English every day.”
  • Possibly institute a monetary reward for vetted contributions of significance and merit (but allow them to be small in order to encourage participation).
    • Could give a reward to a randomly selected contributor each unit of time. (How would each contributor’s probability of being selected be determined?)
    • Or set up a bounty system: Have a board which specifies a goal/request, the conditions under which it would be met, and the reward. First person to succeed claims the bounty and it gets closed and archived.
    • Set up an auction. People bid on getting help or contributions/promises vie for reward.
    • Possible tasks: contributing translations, learning material/courses/video lectures, updating old material, cataloguing development or ideas, designing new interfaces/websites, holding community meet-ups or events, holding advertisement conferences to bring people in, flashcards, translating common interfaces (programs on phones, etc.), stories, poems, diary entries, captions

for movies or television shows.

    • The condition would be that all work submitted would be with the CC0 content licence or similar.
    • Negatives:
      • No contract. Could be problematic (legally or just socially – social harm could really wound our community)
      • How does one determine what is fair? How do we measure work? Poor workers/work could be rewarded as much as good workers/work. Do we want to encourage participation and improvement, or do we want to generate good products?
      • Requires large monetary resources.
      • If money disappears, then so too will the interest.
      • Possibly irrevocably alters the character of our community. Is it a community that loves a great language and wants it to succeed, or is it a business with workers who just want to make money and do not care about the product or what it means (the wider language) – and who do as little as possible while still earning it? Is this a translation factory in which every employee competes against everyone else, or a collaborative exploration of a common interest?
      • Periodic Nobel-Prize-style, fixed-amount rewards from LLG coffers. Various categories; review committee; notable/best contributions rewarded.
  • Website ideas (a lot of this is from la .timoteios. and la .uakci):
    • The website should host only the official or endorsed parts and projects of Lojban.
    • Organize projects centrally via a web-based project-management tool.
      • Perhaps: Phabricator (already used for a Lojban Speech Recognition Tool)
      • Set up http://projects.lojban.org with it.
      • Can also review content. Keeps things organized, centralized, official, and of quality.
      • Useful for proofreading and providing direct feedback with each item.
      • Can be integrated with Git and shared on GitHub. Can host CLL project.
    • Lojban’s web presence is confusing. What is official? What is archived? What is redundant? What is deprecated or obsolete? How can one find material about X / What is supposed to be read? How does one find advice about common topics?
      • Disorganization may be due to the main website being a wiki. Anyone can add anything and it gets haphazard because no-one is designated to oversee everything. External/personal websites or alternatives, as well as forums, leave a sprawling mess.
    • Maintain a single, central, organized website in which everything is official and code-reviewed and reviewed by an official committee.
    • Make sure that all official material is translated into every main language and that any change in any of them is propagated/updated in every other version so that everything is maintained together with only one version of anything (expressed in multiple languages).
    • Move the current website to a new website ( wiki.lojban.org ) and link to it from the new main website with the warning that none of its content should be taken as official unless it is designated as such on the new main website.
    • Would need explicitly defined design goals for the website.
      • Should advertise Lojban effective
      • Provide accessible, up-to- date resources for Lojban (learning, usage, etc.) in all target languages.
      • Clarify exactly what is official and the status/type of unofficial things.
      • Function as a centralized nexus for the community.
      • Invite involvement from community.
      • Connect Lojbanists.
      • Incorporate/mention all external Lojbanic websites, groups, blogs, etc.
      • Facilitate community projects (and the reward system).
      • Low cognitive barrier-to- entry
      • Work well on desktop and mobile devices.
      • Publish new content only upon the approval of certain people and other conditions.
    • Use a system which enables or automates protocols and workflows. Use software with a strictworkflow.
      • Wiki fails here.
    • Vocaroo for short audio recordings
    • Using the Jekyll static website generator with a plugin to support multiple languages:
    • .PO files being a popular, open-source format for translations
    • Could be a plain HTML site which constantly synchronizes with a GitHub repository which in turn is connected to a workflow organization utility.
      • HTML may alienate non-web- developers. Perhaps use Markdown instead? Would separate the text from the website structure – allows for manageability and translation ease.
      • Suggestion for workflow organization utility: Phabricator.
        • No need for GitHub accounts.
        • GitHub has a high learning curve. Phabricator may be more intuitive – need to trial it.
        • Phabricator is open source. Could customize it. (Translate it to Lojban?)
        • Can automate rebuilding of the static site when changes/new content is introduced.
        • Might be able to automate the deployment of many Lojban projects (CLL?).
  • Expand our community demographically in order to ensure that everything is translated and actively maintained in as many languages as possible in a translinguistically compatible way.
  • Find support for hosting costs.
  • List of some projects:
    • Tweet things in Lojban (including haikus)
    • Write poems.
      • Weekly poems (pemkarni) – an ongoing effort
    • Answer Quora questions
    • Develop the Interactive Story (lo lisri pe la .norman.)
    • Catalogue open questions/problems/topics of exploration
    • Lojban Stack Exchange
    • Create YouTube vocab-builder slideshows.
    • Translate short works. (Perhaps focus on children’s literature or historically important missives).
    • Audio record Lojban speech in order to practice and so that others may test recognition.
    • Translate important texts (Bible, etc.)
    • Word database
      • Improve/new Anki flashcard decks
      • Organize example sentences for words in one location (per word) with really good

glosses and other notes.

      • Organize lists of lujvo by veljvo.
      • Organize gismu according to frame or the types and case roles of the sumti places.
      • Organize words by frequency.
      • Organize words by topic or meaning (thesaurus).
    • Fix sutysisku so that it works offline and does not lose its cache in Firefox.
    • Allow for manipulation of dictionaries and texts.
      • Example: First use of a word in a text will have a gloss pop up.
    • Maintain list of all words of a certain type without definitions (all gismu-form words, official gismu, experimental gismu, gismu of form CCVCV, rafsi of form CVV, etc.). This will allow people to be able to easily access wordlists for programs.
    • Maintain a list of rafsi and their associated gismu (and example lujvo?)
    • “Designing rules for using terminators that require no software support to apply and that are learnable, grammatically correct, and reasonably terse. Ku will be scarce, beho more frequent.”
    • Figuring out how to write math with mostly bridi and few mekso, based on Robin's helpful article.
    • “Sketching what the language specifications and requirements must have been to come up with the language we got. I'm figuring out whether a better morphophonology could have met the requirements. It should be much simpler.” (la bremenli)
    • FAQ’s for all sorts of aspects of the language and its use in practice, and for the community
    • Translation tips
      • Record observations like “I found that this complex idea in English could be translated to this simple Lojban idea”.
    • Translation help center?
      • Either ask for real-time help, or look through responses to already-asked questions.
    • List of short problems that have arisen in translation projects and their solutions
    • List of open projects, ideas, or questions.
  • Advertising is hard but retention is harder. How do we fix both?
    • Smooth the learning curve.
    • Better organize the website.
    • Give people projects.
    • Formal mentor-mentee relationships
      • Suzil proposes that new learners get paired together.
      • Could go with triads of one experienced language user and two newcomers.
      • Keep a list of people who are currently learning/skilled, with their skill level.
      • Ask for interests, skill level, native and functional secondary languages,

timezone/location, goals, free times in schedule

    • Check-ups
    • Community get-togethers.
    • Express learning material in multiple ways. Some people are comfortable with the IPA but get confused by approximate pronunciation descriptions based on English – and IPA is easier to reference at a glance.
    • Voice chat rooms, some of which are not solely in Lojban.
      • TeamSpeak, Mumble, etc.
    • Low-investment ways to encourage new speakers to join and stay.
    • Build community habits: certain people schedule regular times to do certain things and are kept to it. (Shame is helpful - make people rely on them)
    • Surveys for suggestions
    • Crash Course
  • Maintain a census of the Lojban community for data purposes and in order to keep track of who is good for what purposes.