Re: Offlang suggestion & counterproposal

> Van:  Jan van Steenbergen
> > We had one, briefly, Nederlands Genootschap voor
> > Linguafictie. It foundered because the people in it
> > (no more than half a dozen) either weren't
> > interested enough any more, or stopped being
> > friends. It was never "official" as in "founded by
> > deed poll", and that was a good thing, because that
> > made it much easier to stop having it when it
> > effectively stopped existing.
>
> I agree with Irina. If you really want to found an
> "official" club, you would need statutes, a board,
> money, some kind of defined activities, and at least
> 25 people who are fully dedicated to those activities.
Well, that's a little overdone. For a basic but official organisation, 5
people are enough. Statutes are not a problem for me, I have written a dozen
of statues for various smaller and larger organisations. Money is a
prerequisite if you want to register with the chamber of commerce (which
would make the organization legal, in the sense of having the rights of a
corporate body ("rechtspersoon")), which costs about €30 per year, when I
last checked.

> First of all, where will we find those 25 who would be
> needed to keep even an unofficial club running?
We need only about 5.

> Secondly, conlanging is in most cases quite a solistic
> activity. What would club meetings actually look like?
Well, you could have "conventions" where people meet and exchaneg conlang
ideas and show each other their conlangs. Instead of organizing your own
events, you could particiapte in existing events, though there might be some
discussion on where to participate and when.

> Either lot of talking about other things than
> conlanging (which is fine to me, but you don't need a
> club for that),
I agree. For that, we can just impose on Christophe's Jan's hospitality :-)

> or a bunch of people with bags filled
> up with their conlang materials, telling each other:
> "If you show me yours, I'll show you mine"?
Hmm, such a statement would be detrimental to the public view on the
organization.

> On the other hand, I really like the idea of some kind of regular
meetings. I enjoyed the evening at
> Christophe's place, and would be happy to invite you guys to mine some
day.

Sounds great.

> About the club idea: Holland is just too small for such a thing. A club
should be rather world-wide, or
> at least European. But who would like to take the airplane every month
from, say, Finland to Vienna?

Well, the alternative could be an international organization for conlanging.
A club or organization is not necessarily based on meeting every month, but
can also be generally founded to promote a certain type of activities (e.g.
conlanging).

> Some smaller, clublike things could be possibly be
> done, though. I think of, for example, the Conlang
> Database Project, or even the FAQ project.
They are more activities, not really organisations.

> Furthermore, it would be thinkable to create a conlang
> weekly, or monthly, to be available for members of the
> List and eventual other subscribers. It could contain
> some of the better bits from the List Archives, like
> translation exercises (put together in a more orderly
> way than in the archives), introductions to languages,
> besides articles and whatever else would be suitable
> in such an electronic paper.
Hmm, we have a lot of that already. The conlang community is well organized
online, but lacks a link to the real world outside our electronic devices.

> Who wishes to say something on this subject?
I think I just did, although somewhat incoherently.

Maarten

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