LLG 1997 Annual Meeting Announcement

Posted by lojbab to lojban on July 2, 1997:

This message is to remind Lojbanists and other interested people that LogFest 97, our annual gathering of Lojbanists held here in the Washington DC suburbs (Fairfax VA) in conjunction with the annual meeting of The Logical Language Group, Inc., is scheduled for the first weekend in August (I think that is August 2-3). At LogFest there is generally a lot of intellectual and social discussion on a variety of topics, thus far mostly in English, though some in Lojban and Esperanto. We of course are trying to promote ever-increasing use of Lojban at these gatherings. It is a congenial gathering for conlangers who have some interest in Lojban as well as serious Lojbanists trying to master the language.

The annual meeting will be held at 1030 AM on Sunday. I am open to any call for particular agenda items to be discussed. There are no pending Bylaw amendments. We will be discussing publication of the Lojban reference grammar and dictionary (see below). The LLG Board of Directors has elected to postpone discussion of a final lexicon baseline (which was scheduled for this week) until LogFest, since no significant work has been done on that aspect of the language documentation in preparation for such a baseline.

Except for the annual meeting this is a pretty informal gathering. People come from around the area and/or from out of town. We have a couple of guest beds and mattresses, and people sleep whenever and wherever they find a quiet spot. Some people come on Friday night, and some stay over until Monday - we are fairly flexible in hosting. Bring a sleeping bag if convenient, and we ask for a voluntary donation of $30 or more for the weekend to help offset expenses. We ask that people let us know informally whether they might attend, so we can plan for meals and other logistical considerations.

All activities are held at my house in Fairfax VA, located at the end of the Metro line and hence fairly convenient for travellers coming from out of town via bus train or plane - rarely does any out of town guest need to rent a car.

For those unable to attend in person, we are planning our annual Lojban IRC interaction on the net at internationally convenient times. These have generally been at one or more of 930AM, 2PM, 6PM, and 10PM EDT (GMT -4 hours) on both Saturday and Sunday. In previous years we have had people from as many as 5 different countries participating in in-language discussion, though IRC glitches seem to crop up to somehow make things other than optimal.

Just as a brief progress report on book publication of the Lojban Reference Grammar. We have had a well-timed contact with a printer who can take the book to press with considerably less work needed on our part than we were expecting. By adjusting to a somewhat larger than standard book/page size (5" of text per line), I have been able to cut the page count down to around 640 pages - it was over 800 prior to this change. 90% of the book is rough formatted, and I am doing a second formatting pass to clean things up which is half done. What all this means is that there is a realistic chance that the book can go to press before LogFest, and it is possible that we may have several paperbound proof copies at LogFest for people to pore over. At LogFest we will be able to discuss final pricing, but a price for the textbook-quality hardbound volume will probably be between $30 and $50.

Comments and questions on all this are welcome.