report on LogFest 92

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab>]

This is a report on LogFest 92, which took place the weekend of 14-17
August 1992, and included the annual meeting of LLG. 16 people attended.
As usual, Friday night was arrival night, with socializing and people
coming in the door until well after midnight.  Lojban-related activities
started on Saturday and continued through Monday, though most people
left on Sunday night and Monday morning.

On Saturday, the Lojban community welcomed the return of Athelstan, who
was able to attend for a few hours with the assistance of his parents,
who are helping him out in his recovery from February's auto accident.
It will be a while yet before Athelstan can resume the major
contributions to the Lojban effort that he was making before the
accident, but having him show up at LogFest was a real morale booster
for us, and probably also for him.

Athelstan was able to stay and serve as 'critic' while the summer '92 DC
Lojban class and John Cowan helped present Nora's operettina "le ci
cribe", for lojbo verba of all ages.  As with the previous effort of
this kind, Cinderelwood (1989), our low budget, low practice, production
group set a new standard for lojbo draci, but aren't about to hit
Broadway in the near future.  The Lojbanic lyrics went well with the
collections of children's songs to which the playlet was set, and some
hasty but serious practice efforts before the presentation meant that
the actors sang their lines without stumbling.  Athelstan the critic
gave it a thumbs up before departing; we'll be looking forward to his
next visit.

Another major activity on Saturday was the discussion of the Lojban
Kalevala project, about which I've reported separately.  All in all, we
tried to keep Saturday a little bit light, knowing that Sunday's
business meeting was likely to be long and emotionally draining.  Thus,
discussions stayed in English, and ranged over a wide variety of topics
related to the Lojban effort.

TLI Business meeting

The business meeting started at 9:30AM Sunday morning.  We had several
key people missing, as pc had business matters in Arizona to take care
of, John Hodges' car broke down at the last minute, and Art Wieners was
called back to work from vacation for a crisis that made him unavailable
all weekend.  However, all of these people had made their positions
clear on the issues at hand, and the meeting proceeded surprising well.
The following summarizes the results of the meeting:

Organizational

Nick Nicholas and Colin Fine were elected as the first non-US voting
members of LLG.  We consider all of the Lojban community to be part of
LLG, but he have to have a clearly defined voting membership for legal
purposes to manage organizational matters.  Also added were David Young,
Sylvia Rutiser, and David Twery.  Jeff Taylor, who hasn't actively
participated for the last couple of years, was dropped as a voting
member.  To make clear the nature of voting membership, a resolution was
passed explicitly stating on the record that voting members should
consider themselves as representing the community at-large, and not just
themselves, in matters that are decided.

Several bylaw changes were made, all relating to procedures involved in
holding members' and Board of Directors' meetings when we are so
geographically dispersed and several members cannot be physically
present for the meeting, especially the overseas members; we do not want
inability to attend LogFest to prevent people from participating in the
LLG decision-making, especially such major technical contributors as
Nick and Colin.  These bylaw changes are an evolving process, as we
adapt to LLG's continuing growth and international spread; every year,
we seem to need a few more changes to meet new problems that have
arisen.  Copies of the current LLG Bylaws are available at cost to any
member of the community.

Bob and Nora LeChevalier, John Cowan, and pc were re-elected to the LLG
Board of Directors, and in a brief meeting of the Board after the
members' meeting, Bob was reelected President of LLG, pc as Vice
President, and Nora as Secretary/Treasurer.

Negotiation with TLI

The major political issue was the determination of LLG policy towards
The Loglan Institute and JCB, now that the legal battle is over.  There
have been some initial efforts towards a negotiation between the two
groups, with both sides expressing an interest in reuniting the effort
behind a single version of the language.

Of course, the commonalty doesn't go much further, as TLI wants LLG to
disband and merge into TLI behind its version of Loglan, while LLG is
committed to Lojban, which is a much superior version of the language,
and has a larger group of people actually doing something with the
language.  The LLG membership showed extreme distrust towards TLI, and
voted to insist on two key preconditions to further negotiations:

a) Both organizations must sign a binding agreement preventing legal
action resulting from further negotiations; the members want to make
sure that TLI's offers to negotiate are bona fide and not an attempt to
set us up for a lawsuit.

b) TLI must drop its 'trade secret' protection on all aspects of its
design for its version of the language.  LLG being committed to the
freedom of the Loglan community to freely use the language howsoever
they choose, the members felt that a 'secret' grammar is anathema to the
concept of a large community of people using a constructed language,
especially one intended for scientific research.  It is felt that no
real progress can be made on possible merger of the two languages while
TLI continued to keep theirs secret where neither TLI nor LLG supporters
could see the language details and evaluate them on their merits.

The general bent of the membership was to be open to negotiations
provided that TLI demonstrated bona fide intent by meeting the
preconditions, but there is little sentiment for allowing significant
changes in Lojban as part of a merger of languages; we collectively
believe that the Lojban design is far superior to anything the TLI
designers might have come up with in the past couple of years since the
last good information about their flawed version of the language.

I proposed a strategy for remerger of the efforts starting with the
adoption of alternative ways of writing the two language versions so
that they resemble each other in appearance, thus making cosmetic
appearance not an issue (as it appears to be for JCB) when the two
languages are essentially the same in the structures that determine how
the language looks on paper.  John Cowan posted on this list a couple of
months ago an alternate orthography for Loglan/Lojban allowing it to
look in print very much like TLI Loglan.

Following such an initial step, each organization would study in depth
the two language versions looking for similarities and differences.  We
would try to convince TLI to adopt our changes into their language, and
they presumably would try to convince us to adopt their design where we
differ.  Vocabulary lists are likely to be the major unresolvable issue
under this approach.  When the review is completed, the decision of
which vocabulary list and which version of any unresolved differences to
go with would be put to a vote of the supporters of each version.  If
one version wins the vote in both organizations, then the language
versions have remerged.  Otherwise, the two organizations go there
separate ways, but with languages presumably much closer together.

It is the collective belief of the LLG membership that if no merger
takes place, that TLI will fade away eventually when JCB dies (he is 71
years old), since he is the only real force holding that organization
together both organizationally and financially.  Most LLG members have
expressed an unwillingness to accept any changes in Lojban that in any
way detract from the current design - any evolution of Lojban would have
to be a positive one, and we have no reason to believe that there are
any differences between the two languages wherein changing Lojban to
match TLI Loglan would enhance the language.

As such, faced with lengthy negotiations even if TLI meets our necessary
preconditions, the membership reiterated its intent that we publish the
books defining the Lojban design that are currently in preparation,
noting that as each book is published it will further cement us in a
position wherein we cannot accept changes to the language in concession
to TLI.  Thus the ball is in TLI's court and they will have to move fast
if they wish to have any significant chance of influencing the direction
of a future combined effort.

Forthcoming Books

There was lengthy and emotional debate on the continuing delays in
getting the baseline books out.  All the good excuses in the world do
not ameliorate the fact that many Lojbanists are waiting for the books,
convinced either that they cannot learn the language without the books,
or that the language will change on them after they've learned it, if
they learn the language before it is set down in the books.  Our very
conservative baseline approach does not satisfy the latter people; only
the books will do.

The membership thus forced John Cowan and me to more strongly commit to
getting the books done as quickly as possible, and to avoid changes to
the language definition except insofar as glitches come to light during
book writing.  We expect to have the proto-dictionary done before the
end of the year, with the proto-textbook and introductory book following
soon after.  John Cowan's papers will be assembled into a reference
grammar to conclude the initial design documents.  We are trying to have
all 4 books done within a year, though John's book will be the slowest
to be completed.

John believes that after these books are completed, there will likely be
no further changes to the language, and we will go immediately into the
long-term design-ending baseline.  I continue to intend to produce a
real textbook and dictionary (of which the first two books are indeed
'prototypes') that will define the baseline, but even John doubts that
this will happen in a timely manner, and that the proto-books will be
the ones used in the baseline.  I have agreed that the bottom line on
the book publication will be how fast we can get them written, coupled
with the finances of publishing, and not my goals to produce more
'perfect' non-proto versions of the books.  This, and a renewed
commitment to stop fiddling with the language design, mollified some
very frustrated and impatient Lojban supporters.

The conclusion, as I've tried to make it clear many times before, is
that the community very strongly wants the language to be DONE, and
USABLE, and does not care whether the language is any closer to PERFECT
than it currently is.  I stand on record as recognizing that sentiment
of the community as expressed by the membership, that has elected me to
lead the effort.

Baseline Status/Language Design

The membership voted to update the grammar baseline as of the
proto-dictionary publication, to include changes approved by the
technical committee that has been reviewing those changes (which are all
considered relatively minor by the members).  The rafsi and cmavo lists
will also be baselined when the book is published, incorporating the
current reviews, and the intent is to baseline the morphology algorithm
published in JL16, though John Cowan wants to have the algorithm coded
and verified before making such a commitment.  With all of these
baselines, the only significant language feature that will not be
baselined are the gismu place structures, although it is believed that
the simple fact of putting those into the book will effectively baseline
them as well (the difference to me is that I don't want to feel
obligated to defend a stupidity that we missed in the place structure
simply because we made a promise not to change.  There are known
weaknesses in other aspects of the Lojban design, but they are NOT
considered open for change because of our baseline commitment to avoid
change where possible.

The two gismu proposed in JL16, vukro and slovo, were added to the gismu
baseline, along with four new gismu for metric prefixes reflecting their
addition to the international metric standard.

As part of the rafsi review, there emerged strong feeling that the gismu
for "daytime" as distinct from "day" (= 24 hours) should have good
rafsi, which was not possible without severe tradeoffs given the word
(dinri) that resulted when the word was generated last year using the
word-making algorithm.  As was done in the case of "less than", which
was changed from "ckamu" to "mleca" because of the need for a good
rafsi, the membership approved that this word be chaged, disregarding
the scoring algorithm if necessary.  This was considered acceptable only
because the word is a new one added just last year and is neither in
common use yet nor even reflected in our published lists.  To minimize
relearning difficulty, John Cowan and I opted to change only a single
letter, and the gismu for 'daytime' is now "donri", with rafsi dor and
do'i.  The membership approved this change.


That was it for the members meeting.  We also had two committee
meetings, one to correlate and decide the results of the rafsi review,
based on comments received from my posting a couple of weeks ago, and
the other to allocate the $142 received last winter in donations
specifically to support active, non-paying Lojbanists who cannot afford
to pay for materials.  The money was allocated toward 2-issue
subscriptions for several people, with the hope that our finances have
improved by then and more money is available to help such people out at
that point.

John Cowan put together a new parser based on the current set of
proposed grammar changes, which are expected to be approved, and it will
hopefully be tested thoroughly in coming weeks by some key people who
write a lot of Lojban text.

Sunday night and Monday were spent in more Lojbanic activities, a little
conversation, and going over David Twery's writing effort which he has
posted here already.  By then everyone was exhausted, as another busy
and successful Logfest came to an end.

We aren't sure what LogFest will be like next year, given that we expect
to have the patter of little feet around by then, and have not yet set a
date for LogFest 93.  We expect that there will be much more in-language
activities, since the current class should be conversationally
functional within a few weeks.  Given the addition to our family, we are
hoping others coming to LogFest will bring their families as well.
There is a possibility for a weekend gathering before next LogFest which
will be an all-Lojban affair, with no English permitted.  This is an
ambitious undertaking - the language is ready for it though.  The major
factor will be the adoption process and the impact of it (and the kids)
on our time.  The critical factor, as the new Lojban class has found
out, is vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary.  They have covered most of
the grammar in seven 2-hour sessions, but noone has nearly enough
vocabulary comand to converse.  Hopefully with this weekend gathering as
a goal, those of the community who want to see the language brought to
life will get to work on their word lists and LogFlash, and try to be
here if we can put this weekend together.

lojbab