Re: A proposal to bring together the conlang communities

On Jan 29, 2008 12:47 PM, caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:
> >Donald Boozer <donaldboozer@...> wrote:
>
> >1) A unified wiki/blog/list etc:...Having a "one-stop shop," so to
> >speak,...I, for one, am a proponent of the "big tent" theory.
>
> Have I understood this concept correctly?  Does this mean that there
> would not any other conlang sites?  Only one big massive site?
Close but not *quite*.

Nobody can force anyone else to not have sites. It'd be foolish to even try.

However, one CAN try to make something that becomes a de facto central
ground for everyone - and if it worked (i.e. all the major needs for
specific-content areas are met) then it could just make other sites
redundant.

Also, as I've mentioned a couple times earlier in the thread, my idea
is not "put everyone in one room", it's "put everyone in one
building". I fully agree with the objections that have been raised
that putting everyone in one room is problematic both because of
volume (it'd probably be at least CONLANG + ZBB volume, which is a
lot) and topics (gotta keep the colors separated, as the Offspring
would say... at least to the degree of not wandering *accidentally* on
each others' turfs).

So there'd still be separate rooms within that - eg artlanger vs
engelanger vs auxlanger subfora - it'd just be easy to go between 'em
and participate in more than one, with just the one account.

I see no especial reason why it can't be accessed either as a 'mailing
list' or as a 'bulletin board'; those are just different interfaces
(and yes, many people have a preference; I happen to like both for
different reasons). The more important question IMO is to what extent
the cultural / topical groups would merge or not.

In the simplest transition scenario, we could have subfora just
directly copied from the current systems, so eg there'd be a CONLANG
subforum with OT:/TECH: subsubforum, AUXLANG subforum, ZBB subforum
with all of its current substructure, etc. This would preserve the
current splittings of people, culture, topic, etc, but at least make
them easily and mutually accessible because they're all literally on
the same page - and over time things would start to merge (or not) as
much as appropriate (so that eg the CONLANG OT: / TECH: subforum and
the ZBB Ephemera or None Of The Above fora might merge).

This allows administrative control to be basically identical to its
current form (no need to tread on anyone's toes; as I said, this isn't
some sort of bid to 'control the community'), but with an extra role
for meta-administrators to help glue things together and handle server
issues.

Again, I'll point to http://forums.randi.org for an example of what
IMO is a very well-designed metaforum with quite diverse topics,
people, subfora, and even subsubfora, all working pretty well
together. It's *very* lively, with sometimes quite heated debates
between people from very differing worldviews, but even those are
handled pretty well.


Similarly, people could still have their own totally personal and
self-controlled webspaces to talk about their languages, unrelated
personal projects, dogs, local sports team, blog, whatever - but we
could probably e.g. offer yournamehere.conlang.org as well as free
hosting & email, at least for LCS members (not sure yet on the
economics of offering that to everyone). Given the massive cost
scaling benefits, we could also probably just keep old sites around
even after their creator loses interest or the like, so there'd be no
more dead links to conlang(er) pages.

We could require something relatively simple to allow for 'glue', like
e.g. each member has to submit a blurb and short checklist about their
website's content, updated occasionally - and use that to make a
searchable list of sites by content. Sorta like a webring in a sense,
except again all under one (very large and diverse) 'roof', with a
nice name, a close-at-hand community to share and collaborate with,
and fairly liberal policies (resolvable simply to "don't do something
that'll get us sued or make other people's stuff not work").


Hopefully this makes my proposal a bit clearer. I recognize and
actually agree with all the (perfectly legitimate) issues that people
have brought up - I just think that most of them stem from
misunderstanding what I'm proposing (which of course is just my fault
for lack of clarity).

So to reiterate very simply: one roof, diverse rooms and sites and
subfora under that roof, all very easily mutually accessible with one
account, with administrative control being moreorless as it is
currently except with the LCS acting as a meta-administrator. Free
access to all, permanent storage, possibly premium services like
hosting to members, and some common shared common resources
(metaforum, wiki, etc).

- Sai