Versatile group management

Okay its been sort of a long time coming but we are really beginning to bump up against a major hurdle in the development of our group/area luskwood, and that is that the current group system simply is not flexible enough to allow us to really grow much more than we already have.

Let me explain myself abit here... we started small, just 4 friends, a little land, and a theme kinda idea, 'lets make a forest/park here!' and in a way that suited us ideally for the structure of SL's group system of nearly 2 years ago.

We all trusted eachother implicitly, none of us really cared about monetary things, we just wanted trees. SL's groups kind of assume that, the whole recall deal, the everything essentially split evenly among all officers deal, etc, we couldn't allow actual group members because the land became too valueable too quickly, and the risks of recalls etc was too great... but two years ago... that was fine, we were afterall, just a couple of people who liked trees.

Now however, its nearing the back of 2005 and we're a pretty established theme area... and this same group system that did help foster/nuture us 2 years ago is becoming a serious speed bump in the way of the future as it were.

Its difficult, not having members, to have people effectively contribute more than hanging out... auto return kills builds in progress, but without it the whole area clogs in a matter of hours... People cannot post events on our land without direct, active, intervention on our part, and many many more issues have arisen...

so, i would contend, it may be time to seriously look at revamping the group system... how would we do this though? what kind of changes would work, for SL at large, and not just for 'us' or any one small subgroup.



clearly, the changes made, would have to be sort of 'flexible' or 'extensable' they would have to be optional, in that the current group system would need to have a place, or way of continuing unchanged, into the future, for those groups that do not wish to have change forced upon them... thinking about this for awhile, i had what i consider a pretty decent idea...

what if we managed each group, in a way, like operating systems manages groups of users.... in a given group, there are sort of sets of 'permissions' for things... say, planting trees, being immune to auto return, getting group payments, etc... some people (officers) get some, others (members) don't, and still others (non members) are effectively cut out, from the entire system.

How about if we had a system for creating arbitrary levels within a group... much the same way you can create an arbitrary class of users on your machine. And for each group of users present, we would be able to enable/disable access to any of the group features...

the current system would be easily fit into this new one, just default a group to the three basic tiers (officers, members, non members) and align the permissions to each with what is currently allowed.

in the future however, lets say a group has considerable investment in a theme area, the ability to 'disable recalls' for members would suddenly *ALLOW* a land-holding group to allow in members, of this slightly altered type... it would not be 'democracy' it would simply be a better way of running a theme area...

any number of possiblities would be opened up with a flexible system such as this... full on direct democracies, republics, communes, you name it, so long as the group permissions/access was flexible enough and the number of tiers to a group (reasonably) arbitrary, the new system would allow for it, and for SL as a whole, to expand.


Can't all those things happen now though? sure... they can.. but the burden of the number of hoops that people have to jump through to see them, is constantly growing... We now have THREE seperate groups to manage luskwood... there is the land holding group, which is 4 officers, and no members, then there is the 'member' group for our friends whom we REALLY want to allow to setup home in our area, and a single silly 16sqm plot that they have direct access to... then there is an event group we are working with, which will allow one manager to begin to work with us, as an officer in *THAT* group to begin recruiting members in that group for events they would like to put on but ooh wait now we want to have a store group for people we want to allow to sell things in our store so thats another group, and then we are working on a RL photography gallery and we want an area people can display their RL artwork through that so thats going to be ANOTHER group. and on, and on, and on

keep in mind, we are only allotted 15 groups to begin with.. and every new idea is essentially now being scrutinized with the mind-set 'well can we afford one more group, to take care of/manage that'

and i guarantee you we are not alone... if you look at the amazingly complex, inter-twisted multiple group structures that most mainland builds need, just to keep things managable, and expandable (or the number of mainland builds just plain limited by not launching into such a complex work-around) its getting rather dire.


I'm not saying we need it now now now omg! I'm just sayin, for the future of SL, for more, larger, more ambitious group projects, and natural evolutions of the ones we have, we are going to need this kind of flexable group system, one where there can be many levels of participation, and no 'worries' about many of the problems that plague current groups, like recall elections on simple plain work-horse vendor-groups and the like, etc.

so thats my two and three quarter cents... anyone else want to add anything?

I can say there has been some changes in 1.7 as we test it that may help in that group recalls are now only available to the founder of the group, come and look in preview, lusk and perry are here, see how the other officers see things etc in the group menus etc

www.secondlife.com/preview

Honestly, the entire social structure of the system needs to be looked at and overhauled over time. Group tools are a start. The IM system, outbound communications system, Events and Find system, and Land Tools specifically all need to be fleshed out.



Some thoughts from various threads, some of which are posted by eltee above:

- Group Hierarchies

- Selective Land Deeding (give only residents of this criteria access)

- Ability to rename a group

- Removal of recall elections ad nauseum

- Group Messaging (sending an IM/notice to all members of a group instead of using the voting workaround)

- llReturnObject(key id)

- An internal, Google-like system that recursively and independantly spiders across new data

- More passive land ban features

- No-Script barriers above 10m for private sims

- Outbound XMLRPC

- The ability for residents to "purchase" rights like Outbound XMLRPC, independant of land tier

- More than 15 groups/resident

- IRC-like chat interface

The list goes on, but those are the ones off the top of my head.

AAAND as we get more businesses in SL doing tech support, the need for personalized Live Help systems as tailored to the ubergroups of the future will be a big plus.

yeah jeffrey, the sorta idea i had was a coherent, simple gui/interface that would serve as a framework to deliver the lions share of those ideas that people have had, in a consistent and hopefully at least semi-familiar way that people won have trouble using...

what to hire event coordinators and let them setup stuff in yer area? check off build okay, but probably not land edit, or resell... and probably not group-pay either since you'd be paying them assumably per event..

so many of the diverse, but necessary group ideas, sort of just fall into place, if you look at the overall interface first, and come up with a good sort of 'meme' as to how to go about group management

for example, rather than spending tens or hundreds of horus implementing in all the desired group features one by one, coming up with the idea of the 'user class' interface where you can arbitrarily make a class of membership, in your group, and customize (as the founder assumably) what happens to people at each level you setup, permission wise, takes care of *most* of the asked for features, by itself...

ontop of that, there is absolutely no need to 'force' the changes on anyone since every group could be seamlessly brought in to the new system just by setting up the current 'membership' levels and default permissions for them that we've always had... yer just then opening the door for each group to branch out with the system more, in the future

YES!

Eltee's right on the money. I've had similar challenges at the Shelter.

The Shelter is supported by volunteers - both from an AV-resource perspective, and a financial-donation perspective.

One of the things I've tried to setup is a way so that even if I get hit by a car tommorow, the Shelter wont just go poof. I try to keep enough of a balance in my SL account such that the tier bill will be paid several months in advance - at one point it was a year in advance.

Also, I've intentionally not taken advantage of things like the 10% group bonus - just so that there's ZERO chance that some sort of drama could happen, and have a rogue officer sell the land the Shelter sits on out from under it.

Unfortunately, the HUGE downside of all this - is I'm the only one with land-permissions. If an object on the property needs to be returned, or outside scripts need to be shut off because of a grief attack, or someone needs to be added to the land-ban list.... I am the only one that can do those things.

Since I work a 50+ hour a week day job, my time at the Shelter is limited to my evenings - and the volunteers are left to fend for themselves during my day at work. That sucks. Often I'll get frantic emails at work that "Such & Such is going on" - but I'm powerless to do anything until I get home.

Heaven forbid I go on vacation. Even for the SLCC, I had my laptop with me, and was plugged in incase I was needed.

I am able to mitigate some of this: A security script has proven invaluable for delegating at least the griefer-ejection to the volunteers. But IMHO, its a crappy solution, and I long for something more efficient. (See my sig).

---I would love to have some sort of group type where the Creator of the group maintained the ownership of the land - but the Officers maintained day-to-day control.

---I'd love to give my officers the ability to do anything with the land controls except return objects owned by me, and set the For Sale functions on the property.

---I also wish that, as the group creator, I could remove officers as they come and go. Today, Officership is like a lifetime appointment to the surpreme court. Because of that, I have to be *extremely* judicious about who I choose to be an officer. And if they become a problem, woe be to me.

Prop 244 has been out there for 6 long months, yet no action has been taken yet to improve groups, or improve the mainland parcel tools. I know the squeaky wheel gets the grease.... when are we as a community going to start getting squeaky?

Can I drop the "We want an API" bomb on this issue? Please?