Change in administrator on the way

[janMato]

jan Sonja just sent me an email offering to turn over the tokipona.org website & the associated conlang to me. So it looks like I'll be doing the administrative work for ma pi toki pona. [Update: it isn't clear anymore what jan Sonja had in mind when she sent me the message] I don't plan to do any conlanging, (no toki pona 2.0), but I do hope to use the most highly trafficed toki pona site (or maybe 2nd after jan Pije's) to allow the community to resolve technical issues. I kind of have things like the standards committees for programming languages and tournament rules committees for card games as my mental model for how the community will participate. The other model I have in mind is the editor of a magazine, who doesn't write everything, but tries to make the final document cohesive and coherent in a way that a true committee couldn't.

And maybe, we'll be able to pull together a book this way, too. Opinions?

[Kuti]

I had a talk with her earlier on IRC. I still don't know what to think but if she really don't have the time for the forum it is better like this.

[janMato]

If elected, (jan Sonja hasn't hand over they keys yet) my project list is some subset of these:

Vocabulary
1) Post a moratorium on new words.
2) Fill in the blanks on the wiki's dictionary section using legacy jan Sonja text and possible jan Kipo test.
3) And finally merge one of the French translations.
4) Make a ruling on the apopcyrphal words.

Grammar
5) Post sample rulings on techinical grammar issues, solicit feedback from community and post on the wiki. Any ruling on which is better:

kule lon palisa luka li pona tawa mi.
vs
kulu pi lon palisa luka li pona tawa mi.
(or something else)

is better than having no ruling.

Community
6) Re-open a mailing list. The forum spares the mailbox in times of lapsed interest but takes away a means for announcements.
7) Update the publications page. toki pona's continued existence on wikipedia relies on there being substantial mentions of toki pona in books, newspapers, magazines, etc.
8) Create a page to address inaccuracies and quality issues on the wikipedia page.
9) tokipona.org should create links to the most active toki pona sites, e.g. toki lili, jan Pije, jan Kipo's site, jan Ote's site, jan Josan's site, and tokipona.net (which happens to be my own site). tokipona.org has a very high google rank score and google will give a lot of weight to sites that tokipona.org "votes" for when sorting results. It is a pity that some of the top results in google are outdated reviews of the language by people who hadn't quite grasped what toki pona was or could be.

Community Translations
10) tokipona.org should solicit and post translations of the jan Pije lessons and host them

Forum Administrativia
11) The jan sona forum should be made public. There isn't any interesting stuff that hasn't already leaked and not being able to read it makes certain discussions hard to understand (i.e. the trademark controversy)
12) An administrativia sub forum should be created for posting administativia things like all of the above.

The Book
13) An officially sponsored book creation project should be created. The book would be creative commons and use pre-existing materials as much as possible, with a lesson, dictionary and graded reader section. The book would be published for free in Ebook and Kindle format. There has been enormous interest in having a great big book, it's time to make one and it should be made by the community.
14) Wiki, forum and mailing list terms of service should be updated to make it clear that user contributions will be under a Creative Commons-by-attribution

Toki Pona's Continuity
15) A zip of the entire wiki and forum should be made downloadable so that fans can post mirrors. A good percent of toki pona's history is already disappearing from the internet and is not recoverable from archive.org

Diplomacy
16) toki pona is, at the moment at least in the top three of "small" conlangs. There have been dozens of imitators and other small conlangs. We should embrace these other communities and individual creators by posting links on the wiki to "other small languages" There should always be a friendly outlet for people who want to innovate toki pona in directions that would make it incompatible with the text that has appeared between 2000 and 2012. I personally think that small languages have important applied uses and the toki pona community should play a role in helping those uses come into being.

[janKipo]

ex private forum mail:
jan Kipo o toki!

mi mama ike. Toki Pona is very popular. It needs a new mama. Would you be interested in becoming the owner of tokipona.org and all the content on it? You could publish books, do whatever you want. Toki Pona would be all yours.

sonja@kisa.ca

Sonja

To: Sonja
I'd be honored, but possibly not competent. I would surely want to work with Matthew Martin at least and perhaps a few others as they emerge.
Much as I miss your presence, I must concede that your absence has been a hindrance on progress. I think that a number of things have been decided in effect over the last year or so, but could not be implemented, since we seemed to need your approval. Time now for the Great Leap Forward (hopefully less disastrous that the last so named).
One insoluble question: what the heck was 'pu' meant to do?
clifford

janKipo

[janKipo]

And so we have a duumvirate for the nonce until we get areas of influence sorted out. As you know by now, I am not a techy, but a pedant, into editing and correlating and composing, so, I look at the dictionaries (English) and try to add to the commonly used expressions things which have turned up since whenever the last run was made (three years ago? more?), collating the work of techies who can run searches and the like on the corpus.
The idea of putting questions to a vote has not worked well in the past (see previous attempts on any of a dozen or so issues -- usually three or four respondents and no decisions). Perhaps reactivating jan sona in an open way would work better. Or just making the call for a vote more explicit, perhaps an immediate use for a list rather than a forum.
Personally, I take Sonja's departure/retirement as a sign that there will be no new words (for the mainstream language -- I can't help but envision a sanctioned but non-tp extension for the "we really need with the world of today" sorts. Y'know, numbers).
Getting a full dictionary is a first need. I can shift mine over and add common expressions. Backing up the E-t is also relatively simple. Other language versions (there are at least partial ones for Esperanto. French, and Spanish, I think) are also impoartant.
Translations of Pije's lessons (and updating where applicable) is also important, as are translations of these (partials exist in Eo, again, and Fr and Sp and maybe Ru, not sure what else I have heard about).
The dictionary will deal with phantom words (extinct, poorly introduced, made up)

Of course, I think that the case of PP modifying NP is already covered since PP is, by definition two or more words long and thus requires 'pi' to be taken as a unit. But, then, all rules are subject to interpretation and this one already has exceptions (numbers and 'nanpa' + number).

All this is building toward The Book, which is a building in a variety of sites, starting with Pije's of course. I am enduring a Pimsleur two week course in French so I can go on a trip week after next and so I will have some new ideas, I hope.

The rest is techy stuff and what Mato says sounds about right to me. Let's go for it.

[Kuti]

jes Kipo i replied like you. As i told her, she needs to bring us some rules like the Unua Libro, to know what could be changed and how and what should remain still. I think it is important. Since jan Pije's departure, i think that you or jan Mato are the best people to do the job. You are trustable and i'm confident about the future.

[janKipo]

Errh, thanks.
One thing I've gotten from Pimsleur already is the need for some sound. It would be nice if we could get a half a dozen dialogs written up and get several people to record all the parts, then we could make up introductory and reinforcer versions by combining parts from various persons' pieces. This would give exposure to a variety of voices (we are short on jan meli, I fear, and that may be important, but we do have several different Englishes as well as French, Dutch, German, Spanish, and Russian at least. Maybe some orientals?).

Howdy, Do you speak toki pona? toki! sina toki ala toki kepeken toki pona?
Yeah, I speak a bit. But I understand more. toki. mi toki lili. taso mi sona e mute.

And so on.

[janMato]

The idea of putting questions to a vote has not worked well in the past (see previous attempts on any of a dozen or so issues -- usually three or four respondents and no decisions). Perhaps reactivating jan sona in an open way would work better. Or just making the call for a vote more explicit, perhaps an immediate use for a list rather than a forum.

I'm trying to keep my experience with home owner's associations in mind. Really, really small democracies tend to be blighted democracies because there aren't enough people to vote and the voting and the issues put forward is put to vote are made up by those with the spare time and interest, rather than those who know. If I could draft jan Ote for writing and editing corpus text I would.

Maybe the internet standards comittees can provide some inspiration for the governance structure. I alway thought it was rather progressive of them that the only issue "Recommendations" - not a law, rule or other thing with the force of a government's law - after a "Request for Comments" is sent to the outside world. Maybe we can have like a petition section where people can sign onto ideas that they like (i.e. a thumbs up vote on rulings. That way, people could judge for themselves if a ruling has enough support for them to use it in their own writings and communications. I don't think I'd want a vote up and vote down system, for internet communication, I think we ought to error on the side of being overly considerate of how people might react if their idea got 27 thumbs down and 1 thumb up, vs geting only 1 thumb up.)

Another idea I have from the world of software standards is that a suggestion for a standard/rule/recommendation should have an implementation, i.e. if we clear up the issue of numbers, pu, two word prepositional phrases, the recommendation should have a lot of toki pona text illustrating example correct text.

re: issues that feel like they are already resolved
Good, if an issue feels like it is already resolved, then getting to a Recommendation should be a piece of pan suwi.

[Kuti]

Englishes as well as French, Dutch, German, Spanish, and Russian at least. Maybe some orientals?).

http://mapservices.org/myguestmap/map/janKuti

[janMato]

Re: the distribution of toki ponists

Yeah, I get the same map when I map the visitors to tokipona.net -- China, most countries of SE Asia, India, all of the Islamic countries, all of Africa- even South Africa, are virtually unrepresented. I don't know if this is something to do with the history of languages and conlangs in those countries, or if this is internet access related. Conlanging as a hobby is definitely a project of middle-income-and-up countries.

And I guess I ought to resume my translation of the jan Pije lesssons into Icelandic, I'm sure it will make a big numerical impact on ma pi toki pona (ha! see toki ponists aren't very good with numbers)