Group Tier System

I like the idea of a tier system for groups with each tier with it's own name.

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Founder
-Able to remove any type of member.
-Sets the options for the group.
-Promotes/demotes members

Officers
-Can't remove an active founder
-Can vote for a new founder when the founder leaves
-Able to terraform group land.

Members (High Level)
-Members can build on group land without worrying about the timer.

Members (Low Level)
-Doesn't get dwell bonus money for being in group.
-Founder can set group plots so low level members can keep prims on group land with a timer.
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Having a low level member will be nice to have. A founder can use the low level members for vendors and don't have to worry about lowering the groups dwell bonus money by sharing with members that is paying for vendor space.

What is the purpose/motivation behind this proposal?

If the purpose is to allow a more controlled environment for building larger and more complex organizations within SL then I think the idea has merit but lacks scope in that it sets the organization structure too tightly to accommodate varied organizational structure (e.g. partnerships in a previous post) and future growth needs.

The only way that I can see to realistically build an extensible organization structure for groups would be to allow each group to contain/manage sub-groups. The parent group would determine what rights the child sub-group had. A provision for group mergers would also have to be defined. This would allow for many organizational variations (and certainly most of the common ones). In the example provided by the thread author:

- Founders/Partners Group
....- Group Officers Group
........- Regular Group Members Group
........- Non-Profit Sharing Members Group


This could unfortunately get very complicated and could be too much to ask of Linden Labs. Many software companies exist with their sole purpose being to help organizations to manage their various "groups". For instance, what happens when an officer of the above structure tries to modify the rights of a child group that was originally set by a founder/partner? Does the founder/partner group get notified of the proposed change? Does the founder/partner group get notified of the change after-the-fact? If this kind of thing is an option for the parent group then there are quite a few bits of information to store and maintain as well as the fact that it becomes Linden Labs' responsibility to marshal and enforce these rights.

In the computer world the equivalent would be an Active Directory structure or LDAP structure. Both of these are works-in-progress trying to adequately manage the different variations of organization that exist. Often times, organizations are modified or defined to use them so that they can operate within the limits of the structures.

Now the good news is that just as AD and LDAP did not grow to what they are over night, a parent-child group system could be developed that would cover most of the basic organizational needs (and possibly be expanded in the future). Maybe the limit is four levels deep and three child groups per parent group. Assuming that we are allowing for only one uppermost parent group, this would allow for structures containing up to 40 total groups (make it three levels deep maximum and you still cover up to 13 group organization structures). This would significantly improve the current two-tier (plus one individual) organizational structure without being too burdensome to manage.

This is by far not a complete definition of the dynamics but could serve as a basis for development.

The dwell bonus for each child group could be one of two options (set by parent group):

- Equal Share: Members of all child groups so assigned would share equally with the members of the parent group any dwell bonus given to the parent group.

- Percentage: 0%-100% of the Parent groups dwell bonus would be distributed equally to members of the child group. Any remaining dwell bonus would be distributed equally to members of the parent group. The total percentage assigned to all child groups can not exceed 100%. (For instance, a parent group may have two child groups that are each assigned 25% of dwell bonus and one child group that is assigned 0%. Members of the two child groups recieving dwell bonus would each get half the dwell bonus of a member of the parent group.)