I'd like to encourage everyone to not be shy, to feel free to suggest alternative ideas, and to propose to your own new ideas. There's at least one translation exercise in the Proving Grounds that you can demonstrate your ideas on. Or you can go over there and point out what you like and don't like. I have a few procedural proposals,
1. I am going to try to do a weekly report on our progress, new proposals, and sticky points we're still working on. I will try to do that every Monday night (when I have several hours behind a desk with nothing to do but be there in case the people playing D&D in our shop need me). If anyone else wants to be a contributor to the Weekly News, you don't even have to ask. If anyone wants to help compile a grammar and/or lexicon as we go, that would be wonderful.
2. I think we could start building a lexicon of proposed words in topic sets. (And feel free to propose and counter-propose for each). I'd like to suggest Greetings and Common Expressions, Language and Linguistics, Frequently Used Verbs, and People as some vocabulary modules we might look at early on. Feel free to jump in with a topic that's near and dear to your own heart-- food, clothing, shelter, animals, sports, religion, weather, whatever. If someone proposes a word and you think you've got something better, throw it out there. If someone misses a word that fits in the topic, throw that in too.
With any luck, there will be opportunities to take that new vocabulary to the Proving Grounds soon and see how it looks in practice.
3... After a bunch of interruptions, I've completely forgotten what #3 was going to be.