CONLANG conference, and some random things...

I don't think I can afford a west-coast conference, but the prospect
of a conference draws me to propose something I've had in mind for a
long time.

And that is Conference Proceedings.

I have wanted to start a CONLANG Press for some time, where we could
produce print and online versions of things that need to be published.
With Print on Demand now so easy, it's possible to make something like
this happen.

Things I've long wanted to publish include Matt Pearson's Tokana
Grammar, Rick Morneau's Lexical semantics, and no doubt other things.

There is money involved, which is always an issue, even if it isn't
very much. My rough idea would be that monograph authors would get a
royalty on the profits from any work, and a small amount would be kept
in an account to cover fees and any software/hosting charges that may
come up over time.

Electronic copies would be much cheaper, as they would be sold at a
royalty-only price, and hopefully affordable to everyone.

I'd probably use Lulu press, who seem the most honest of the POD lot.
The books are nice enough, but a bit pricy -- that seems to be
unavoidable in the sale of things made immediately for the purchaser.

Formal non-profit status would require lawyers and money up-front, and
does not seem worth it. On that regard you would just have to trust
me. While quiet in recent years, I've been around CONLANG a long time,
and I hope that counts for something.

In any case, we could test the waters on such an idea if people are
willing to create full papers for the meeting. This is also one of the
ways that we can publicize our activity.

If people like this idea, I am willing to sign up to do at least that volume.

The other thing is that I still have the conlang.org domain name. Long
ago, I used to run redirector URL's from work for that domain. That's
no longer possible, but my Registrar has easy facilities to configure
these things, so I'd like to offer again to provide DNS records for
XYZ.conlang.org domains.

There's no financial implication here at all, just ask.

My personal hosting is on my cable modem at the moment, so bandwidth
etc, is a problem for hosting content, but I could manage a few small
projects like that as well. In particular, if someone wants to gather
a list of all Conlang-related Wikis, for example, I could host a
wiki.conlang.org page with pointers to them.

  -- David (Conlang list maintainer of the Silent Oecumene)

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