SL Self Government POLL

Couldn't have summed it up better Jonquille.......and god knows, Ive been trying for the past few months!!!

Without the power to enforce its decisions, (the power to compell, that all governments have), any SL government is a waste of time.

And I wouldn't trust anyone who wanted that power.

Ugh. I don't care how many Liasons you hire (which will be expensive), you're not going to get as good of coverage as with a fully volunteer force. Most of the Liasons know less about the world and its quirks than do most of the folks that have been here a year or more. Heck, even folks being here for 6 months or so have enough general SL knowledge to help their fellow players.

You know, if you don't want to help people, fine, but don't just say "well, they should be being paid for it". Do you think the Salvation Army folks want to be paid? Probably not, most would just donate their salary to the charity anyway.

I'd rather see 8 million go towards product development than herding newbies around with "professional" personnel.

Eventually, the plan is SL will be so big that the Lindens couldn't possibly help everyone. What will we do then? Keep hiring more Liasons? What happens when Liasons outnumber the developers by 5 to 1?

Think big-picture.

LF

And what kind of people are going to "volunteer" to set SL policy and enforce that policy? People with agendas. Land barons. Clubmallsino owners. Clubmallsino promoters. Narcissists. People who are presently under the impression that they're in charge of SL.

No thanks.

You may think Second Life is going to last 50 years. I don't. I think SL will work best as the benevolent dictatorship it is now. I think many Internet endeavors, in practice, work best as benevolent dictatorships. I speak from experience on the matter.

You're never going to change the fact that Linden Lab is the ultimate governor of SL. Player government is only going to serve as another unnecessary barrier between players and Lindens.

Perhaps -- proprietary institutions tend to lose sight of the future in trying to maintain a present-day stasis. They'll eventually crack under the weight of their profiteering gluttony and give way to the next new thing -- sure.

However, LL has given wind of bigger plans... and no doubt we might just see them. Their CEO seems to be one of those "bigger picture" thinkers. I've been thinking that the server-side source for SL should go open-source one-day once they figure out the sim-border bandwidth thing. Then all LL has to do is open up as the largest service provider and other networks can attach themselves to the main grid established by LL.

That seems pretty optimistic... but by that point, SL will be a lot larger and LL won't be the only company involved. What then? SL might need an ICANN or something... which is probably what they're after in developing this "governance," initiative -- nothing like a weak democracy, but a transparent system of conflict resolutions, help systems, and support networks... probably so that when (and maybe if) there are hundreds of thousands or millions of people flying around a ginormous grid, nobody will have any power -- the power will be decentralized amongst the inhabitents.

IMO that is far better than any central system of control.

I agree with Latonia....
That's what private sims are for.

Plus there is the whole "Alt" thing - ballot stuffing comes to mind.

Hell NO!

You see how screwed up RL is?

99% of that is because of "governments" of one sort or another.

No thanks.

A lot of Internet companies in the late 1990s were run by self-styled "bigger picture" thinkers.


Okay, first of all, open-source: Doubtful. Where does Linden Lab get its revenue? Subscription fees and land use fees. What happens when any Second Life user can run the server locally, invite their friends, jack up the prim limits to whatever they want, and build to their heart's content? LL is guaranteed to lose some business right off the bat, after which they'll enter a fee war with the other "service providers", which will probably crush them.

LL might end up licensing the technology to other companies for a hefty price, but we're not gonna see GNU/Second Life on the next SuSE 52-disc install set. So get over it. Open source is not a magic bullet.

Secondly, other companies attaching to SL's grid: What is this going to do to the L$ economy? We've already seen that it requires careful regulation, and since LL happens to be the centralized authority (since they own the servers), they're able to regulate it adequately. Throw other companies into the mix, and you'd need careful contracts between them to preserve the L$ as a currency... and this still doesn't tell you what's going to happen in practice. One screwup and the L$ will collapse. How do you handle a grid rollback? For that matter, whose servers are going to store the L$ balances and transaction records?

The problem with the "bigger picture" is that it doesn't involve Second Life, and it doesn't involve Linden Lab's current business model.

Thanks for the shot of pessimism, but let's also remember that there's a bloody sequel to Everquest. This makes me think (or maybe hope, sure) that SL isn't going to just die in 2 years.

It will 'die' most likely if it remains at its current system with the nature of the world it has created.

And perhaps you're right that instead of open-source, it might stay proprietary and just be "licensed," (shudder) to other companies -- either model suggests that SL will eventually grow out of being run exclusively by one company as an entertainment product and could become a platform. Of which, LL will most likely find a way to be the largest 'provider.'

I do not pretend my insight can predict the future of SL with any certainty, but there is little indication that SL is just going to crash and burn out of no where.

As for speculation on 'forward thinking,' the early adopters of the Internet bandwagon of the "Internet bubble," were just early adopters. They certainly weren't wrong -- just last year online sales nearly beat retail sales in Canada at Christmas. They're expecting it will beat retail this year. So really, we'll just have to wait and see I suppose. Sorry I brought it up.

'government' in one form or another is absolutely neccessary. However, the poster who said we pay to play is very hard to argue against. Perhaps linden labs could hire people and raise land use fees or subscription fees to cover the position? How much would that cost us as players? Is it doable?

Hmm pay more to have some twat tell me how to play.. sounds absolutely capital!

Or -- follow the TOS and and the people who wish government to go play on their own plot of turf... to be honest - I don't think the system as it stands is as broken as some of the doom-sayers would like us to think... I'd say a good two-thirds of the 'problems' I see on the forums are hardly problems -- more like drama.

And the other third is usually dealt with in an expedient manner.

Mike Zidane.


erm.......no...it isn't.

i have found, throughout life, that's it's much easier to recognize and work from within a system. the benign

olicharchy currently imposed on second life works just fine if you take the time to communicate your concern to the

right linden using a bit of praise and decorum. it's not a lot different from petitioning a royal court.

all this talk of self governance seems odd to me. second life is a game operated by a business that will be ruled by

the investors and managers. any non-voluntary implementation that gives power to a select group of players will cost

ll a proportional number of players that will not play under such a system. when it's all quantified, i imagine they

find they lose much less business under the current system than they would under a representative system.

i may be simple minded; but i just don't see where these arguments and suggetions are coming from. what exactly

would a representational government accomplish?

of course my standing suggestion is to licence the server software and let us build our own worlds. that'll provide

us absolute self governance. it'll also put the burden on us to attract people to our world that are willing to live

and work under our system of rules. i wonder how successful some of these models would be under those circumstances?

Just one question: Does Everquest's sequel have a player government?

I don't want to do this discussion any injustice, but I fail to see the relevance of this question in the context of what we have said so far.

I'm sorry, but I'm getting a hint that nobody is really even bothering to follow along with me on any of the points. We're not really challenging any of the points this discussion makes and are rather, it seems, to be debasing one another confrontationally rather than challenging one another in any dialectic method.

I'm just going to leave this discussion and topic as is. I will just remind everyone that wether we like it or not, LL -- the benevolent dictator wants it.

Yes, Icon, you bring up a point which unfortunately goes unheard.

It would be nice to debate how this is all going to work out before it gets shoved down our throats.

The funny thing is, I probably have more agreements with the non-government people than the government people. And yet I'm griefed.

It really goes to show you the unlimited capacity of ignorance.

Blaze, you've more or less highlighted why you're running into trouble with some members of the community with the *shoved down our throats* comment. Some people started to feel that way a while back, so now any thread about it is usually met with opposition and misunderstanding. To be honest, your position has been a little unclear and I don't think people quite understand where you're coming from. I for one do not wish you any grief, and i apologize if I personally made you feel that way. Maybe we should consider that people do feel threatened by the possibilty and let it alone for a while, and/or move it somewhere else until you get a response as to whether or not LL will institute a specific forum for such discussions.