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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoPlainText>I didn't want to dive in too soon and spoil things. Once it's clear that a former designer of FLEx is a long-time RNLD-list member, folks might miss-out on the fun of anti-FLEx analogies, which I've enjoyed. I even appreciated Marks' thinly- veiled jabs at the Christian faith of FLEx's developers :-) <span style='color:black'>I have lived in PNG for so long, with so many Australian friends, that I (almost) appreciate the ribbing. In your culture, this means we’re friends, right? There’s been some constructive criticism, too.</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'>I do hope everyone had a chance to read Beth’s reply, which addressed the inaccuracies of the original post. I would be sorry if folks passed on such ideas as that FLEx isn't open source (you're confusing it with Toolbox), that it isn't for non-linguists (confusing with WeSay?), that it's impossible to collaborate, or that it’s still large and slow (it was largely re-written for speed and size over 2010). What <i>is</i> clearly true is that web presence could be improved in order to make the facts more clear. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'>But with those misunderstandings cleared up, I hope we can get on to the valid concerns and thoughtful questions in Claire's post. There are still some things in FLEx which will make it unattractive to many (no Mac version, requires clean consistent data on import, pre-Himmelman orientation, limits to interoperability, intentionally not a blank-slate like Toolbox). I’d be happy to talk about any of these. For now, I’d like to write a bit on this trade-off —between something which is more of blank slate and something which embodies some basic concepts in order to help with automation.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'>I’m not sure what Claire meant by saying that FLEx was for “non-linguists”, but maybe I agree after all. Software design best-practice calls for identifying a core "persona". Others, below and above that persona can still use the program, but they aren't the target the designer holds in mind. For FLEx, the target audience is not PhDs or PhD candidates, who appear to make up the bulk of folks on this list. FLEx’s core target persona is required to do a broad but often necessarily shallow amount of linguistic description as part of his job. We want to give him tools which guide him along, even at the cost of flexibility. He benefits from a more guided system than would a Linguistics PhD candidate intensely researching one aspect of a language. As the trailer-park analogies have shown, that researcher will trade a lot of pain for the flexibility he/she needs. Hence the continued popularity of SIL's Toolbox among western academics, while so many outside that group have eagerly switched to FLEx. And some western academics too, even on this list (they’re too smart to come out of that closet here </span><span style='font-family:Wingdings;color:black'>J</span><span style='color:black'> ). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'>Users of FLEx appear quite enthusiastic about it, compared to when they were always fighting with Toolbox, creating big messes of inconsistently organized data that they had trouble publishing or repurposing. They don’t care that their data is now in XML, but I do. They’ve forgotten how easily their data became a mess when they used Toolbox, but I haven’t (because I still help people convert once in a while). I’m convinced that data about hundreds of languages are now on their way to long-term usefulness, data which would have otherwise been lost. I’m convinced we’ve “lowered the bar” for our target user, even while agitating some others (who can still use Toolbox). So we accomplished at least part of what we set out to do. Partially. In several ways we failed, and what's more, there are important goals we <i>should</i> have had (back to Claire's post), but didn't. I'll get to at least a couple of those in my next post.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'>In writing all this, I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to sell FLEx to this audience (I may try to sell WeSay or SayMore to you someday, if I’m not too scared). While a firm advocate of SIL’s “Service to all” creed, I recognize that the more beyond-target-persona users FLEx has, the more support & enhancement requests the team must field, all for free. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'>Instead, I'm writing in the hopes that we do have a constructive conversation addressing Claire's questions, with the goal of helping people understand their own choices as consumers of linguistic software, and to help us as a community of users and developers make good choices about future directions.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'>Cheers,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal>John Hatton<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>SIL International Language Software Development, <a href="http://palaso.org/">PALASO</a>, and <a href="http://pnglanguages.org/">SIL Papua New Guinea</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoPlainText><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></body></html>