History: Elephant

Elephant is a concept that John Cowan has been contemplating for a while now, based on the IBIS approach to discussing open-ended issues.

Elephant is a combined Web server and mailing list (hopefully the jboske mailing list); people post to the Web server, which forwards the postings to the mailing list. To fully participate, one must sign up for both.

Initial postings to Elephant consist of Issues: an issue is typically a question.
Responses to Issues must (to a first approximation) consist of Positions on the issues. Responses to Positions are Arguments, either pro or con.

Everything starts when someone posts an Issue at the Web site. The Issue is sent to the mailing list, with an URL at the end. Click on this URL, and you are at the Web site posting a Position. URLs at the end of a Position posting are for posting a pro Argument or a con Argument. Of course, you can go to the web site first, navigate to the Issue or Position you wish to respond to, and
post directly from the site.

The idea here is to prevent the looping behavior of typical mailing lists, where people just repeat their arguments ad nauseam. The Issue-Position-Argument structure prevents this looping, because one can see each person's Position spread out in space, not just serialized in time.

(The advantage over wiki-based discussion, OTOH, is that it's more fascist (i.e. structured & organised), so it's easier for a final Document Of Record to emerge, without requiring that consensus be achieved. — nitcion)

See ElephantRefinements for more.

Current roles:

• Designer: John Cowan
• Implementer: John Cowan
• Ankus: Nick Nicholas See below at P.S.
• Wiki-meister: Robin Lee Powell
• ElephantClerk: John Cowan
• Trampled by Elephant, 2002: John Cowan
• Trampled by Elephant, 2001: Robin Lee Powell
• Trampled by Elephant, 2000: Mark Shoulson

'-->' ElephantStatus

.i le xanto ke casnu velsku cu se cmene ki'u le ka ce'u mutce morji poi se ckaji le'e xanto

• .iku'i le xanto ba'e no'e mutce ckaji le ka morji .i le ranmi po le xanto morji cu se krinu le du'u go'o .i le nu le cifnu xanto cu rinju da poi skori cu rinka le nu le tolcifnu xanto cu ze'e krici le du'u da poi cmalu cu kakne rinju ke'a .i .o'ocu'i rinka lo danlu se ctuca .enai lo ka morji -Robin Lee Powell
• doi nitcion pe'u pe'u sai sai do'u ko ko rere'u morjygau le sumti stura be zo ckaji --mi'e xorxes ba'o dragau

.i la djan. cusku le glico tcaci bo jufra poi se fanva fu "lu .i le'e xanto cu mutce morji .i ku'i ma poi vajni cu vamji lenu le'e xante cu morji li'u"

.i le xanto velsku cu se stidi mu'i lenu loi vajni po'u lo krinu be lei seljdice cu ba se morji

P.S. [Ankus was originally Ankh] Ankh? .i pe'i mi jimpe gi'enai ku'i birti — nitcion
(Ankh = xanto cranunmu'u mukti) .i mi mi'e nitcion. cu sruma la'edi'u ki'u lenu la .anx. sinxa leka jmive kei

• Oops. The ankh is the Egyptian symbol of life, whereas the Indian elephant-goad is the ankus. So emended (And it's not a mukti, it's a muktytci.)

For Real World Elephants, see http://www.save-the-elephants.org and http://elephant.elehost.com. See also elephant art and the EEKMA multilingual Elephant Wiki at http://www.eekma.org/wiki/

Lojban Central has drawn an analogy between the six blind men and the elephant (lojban version) on the one hand, and
the six source languages Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Lojban on the other. Of course, the really arrogant party in the poem is the narrator, who is convinced that he alone knows what the elephant really is!

It is great to see IBIS getting some traction. In the U.S., one of the strongest promoters of IBIS methodologies is Jeff Conklin, and at Compendium Institute, there are links to papers and downloadable software. - JackPark