Here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20197096
is an article from April 1958 issue of the journal "The Reading Teacher" titled "Phonetic Spelling for Better Reading?"
On the first page of that article one sentence says:
The prime emphasis of the outstanding spelling simplifiers of the United States and Great Britain has always been to eliminate the unnecessary waste of time in learning to read the English language.
Damn right! Eliminate the unnecessary waste of time in learning to read the English language! Apparently, in the 1950s (over half a century ago) there was an attempt to push for a spelling reform. But what did come out of it? Not even one tiny thing! ZERO!
Oh, and this Wikipedia page on "English-language spelling reform" starts with this sentence:
For centuries, there has been a movement to reform the spelling of the English language.
Aha... They are talking about centuries there!!!
The incompetent idiots that are in charge everywhere have been preventing a spelling reform in English for CENTURIES already. Do you really think there could a spelling reform any time soon?
Not gonna happen! Not in this century. Not in the next.
But that Wikipedia page is potentially a good resource to consider.
In this June 2019 article titled "Simpler spelling may be more relevant than ever" the BBC says:
The complexity of English spellings has been bothering people for nearly as long as English has been written down. They argue that inconsistent spellings make English unnecessarily hard to learn.
Yeah, no shit!
Tell me something I don't know.
That's followed by:
Compared to the UK variants, US spellings are easier for non-native speakers to learn, being shorter and slightly more phonetic. These US spellings are a legacy of dictionary pioneer Noah Webster’s movement for simplified spelling.
And here's the interesting bit:
There was a practical as well as a political element to this. Not only would learners find it easier to master simplified spellings, Webster reasoned, but humbler spellings were actually more democratic, and would help differentiate the Americans from their recent colonial masters across the pond.
AHA!
"[...] humbler spellings were actually more democratic", Webster reasoned!
And why, exactly, was simpler spelling considered "more democratic"?
Because it's easier to bloody LEARN!
Simpler spelling makes it easy for EVERYONE to learn English. Not just for the rich aristocrats who could afford to hire a private tutor for their children. That's why!
Oh, and my point to add to that is:
It's not just about a private tutor being expensive. It's also about the children wasting their VALUABLE TIME when they could be spending that time learning something that's infinitely MORE VALUABLE than spelling. Like... SCIENCE, for example!
Bloody hell! This shit... this exteme level of stupidity really gets me agitated.
That BBC article continues:
One group that might be helped by simpler spellings is people with dyslexia.
And then (quoting Liory Fern-Pollak, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London.):
Kids learn to read English slower than kids who learned transparent languages like Spanish, Italian, Czech, German.
BINGO!
People with dyslexia (and possibly some of their relatives) will be our allies in this battle. And Liory Fern-Pollak is a candidate for becoming one of the advocates or "evangelists" for Starlan.
This:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lioryfern-pollak/
appears to be Liory's Linkedin profile.
As of March 2022, she is listed there as Associate Professor at UCL Institute of Education.
Here's another page with her contact details:
https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=LFERN17
Opening this UCL page:
https://www.linkedin.com/school/ucl-ioe/
I presently see the following words in the banner:
Double Bingo!
Challenging. Questioning. Impacting.
Those are exactly the words I would use to describe Star City and its mission!
My favorite of those 3 words is questioning. Questioning the status quo. Questioning assumptions. Questioning dogma. Questioning everything that people take for granted!
THAT is how we'll turn Star City into the world leader in science and technology!
We must relentlessly and ruthlessly question everything coming from incompetent idiots. Because incompetent idiots are in charge EVERYWHERE. (look up "the Peter Principle" if you don't believe me)
In this article titled "The Case for Fonetik (Phonetic) Spelling" Tom Pfeifer identifies himself as a proponent of phonetic spelling. Here's his Linkedin profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjpfeifer/
Here's an insightful article titled Spelling reform: not a “lafing” matter:
https://blog.oup.com/2020/04/spelling-reform-not-a-lafing-matter/
by Anatoly Liberman.
If my research is correct, this is his Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Liberman
His contact details are listed on the university's faculty page here:
https://cla.umn.edu/gnsd/people/faculty?UID=aliber
According to Wikipedia, he is a professor in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic and Dutch at the University of Minnesota and an advocate of a spelling reform.
So, professor Liberman might be a great ally.
Interestingly, when you search for "phonetic spelling instructions", you'll find a bunch of universities publishing instructions to pronounce people's names like these two:
https://www.cmu.edu/hub/registrar/docs/phonetic-spelling-instructions.pdf
and
https://www.ndnu.edu/documents/campus-life/NDNU-Name-Pronunciation-Guide.pdf
Apparently people care about the correct pronunciation of their names at the graduation ceremony.
And apparently... phonetic spelling does a great job of making that happen. Hmmm... So, the correct pronunciation of people's names is important. But the correct pronunciation of regular words in everyday speech not so much?
Just watched this episode of the show "Otherwords" titled "The Screwed-Up History of English Spelling":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdRY0x2x6PQ
That 8-minute episode is super-informative and Dr. Erica Brozovsky (host and writer of the show) might be a potential ally. Here's here Linkedin page:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erica-brozovsky/