[Foundation-l] How to dismantle a language committee

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 7:21 AM, Muhammad Alsebaey <shipmaster at gmail.com> wrote:
> With all due respect to all the work Gerard has done, my issue with him is
> simple (should be apparent by now), he approved EA based on a mail exchange
> he had with only one committee member, painted that in a public email as a
> unanimous decision, and it turned out that 4 of his committee members were
> inactive at the time and at least one (I have not heard from the others yet)
> had at least some issues with the decision. I will be completely satisfied
> with a simple acknowledgment that the process was faulty, and that he is
> willing to work to rectify it for the future, as of now, I only see that he
> sees absolutely nothing wrong with what happened.  I just want to see a
> clear path for that not to happen again in LangCom, I have been encouraged
> by Jesse's comments, but they still remain pretty much in contrast with the
> position Gerard maintains.

Two weeks ago or so Gerard (or someone else, I forgot) announced that
Finnish Wikiversity passed. I didn't say anything around this issue
because I don't see anything wrong with it. I could say "OK", "I am
fine with it", but I felt it as fully redundant.

Less than a week ago someone from LangCom proposed closing the
proposal of Southern Min in Hanji (this thread is not yet finished, so
it is not archived) with reasoning that they may use conversion engine
between Latin and Hanji. The other LangCom member agreed with that.
But, Michael Everson and I disagreed with that. Simply, it is not
possible to make a [simple] conversion engine between one phonographic
and one logographic script. (Other issues may be discussed, but a
possibility to solve it with a conversion engine is not a
possibility.)

So, there are two conclusions: (1) I may imagine the process which had
happened in relation to EA approval: no one made any serious objection
and it passed. (2) There are two LangCom members introduced better in
the linguistic issues, so the expertise level is raised and I think
that it will be raised more in the future.