the Optional Corporation

It seems to me that quite potentially, the time of the Optional Corporation is potentially at hand and SL is a potential breeding ground for it.

The Optional Corporation is the corporation you can optionally belong to.

You can belong to one or you can belong to many. Some corporations may attempt to negotiate exclusivity with you, but those are simply minor evolutions of the corporations we have to day in the real world, and are not, strictly speaking, an optional corporation.

The optional corporation pays you mostly on pure revenue share. Some may attempt to pay by salary, but these are, again, simply minor evolutions of the old kind of corporation.

An example of an optional corporation is an affiliate relationship you might have with a company. You provide them with a marketing department and they pay you a share of the revenue.

In SecondLife, the optional corporation has a lot more interesting possibilties. For example, you become a member of a grid-wide game creation optional corporation. You contribute certain things to spec and upon doing so you are given a certain equity in the company. Based on your equity share, you may or may not get voting shares which allow you to help elect a board of directors which in turn, elect the chief executive officer.

This CEO could be responsible for many things, among those would be issuing new shares to pay for new products necessary to make the corporation continue to provide dividends.

And, of course, you can buy and sell shares. Doing so is a great way for the community to vote on which CEOs and their companies they likes the best.

I believe that the optional Corporation may be necessary for secondlife to succeed in that while there are a lot of cool games in SL, they are all very independent and with very little in the way of cooperation. We need to get large groups to come together (and to provide them with incentive to stay together) to build content which is very compelling, very rich, and very deep.

One example of an optional Corporation:

Lets say, VonLand Baron decides to buy 4 sims. He think that a certain WornesWorth is building some very cool prefabs, so he tells him - I'll give you a 10% equity share if you give me unlimited access to your prefabs to populate my sims with.

And then another 30% equity to Triangle Terra for his vehicles to provide transport to denizens in the sim.

And so on.

Oviously there are some challenges here, for example the CEO would have to be an individual of impeccable community reputation and one that people respect and trust. A third, disinterested party would probably provide audit functions to make sure nobody is pocketing the cash (they'd get a 5% equity share).

Another challenge is IP and the necessity of a fully transparent business model to engender a certain amount of trust. Also, you could be optionally working for the competition as well.

However, transparency is good for everyone. Secrets are always sources of corruption and provide friction for the advancement of society in general.

And the great thing about this model is that the power is transferred on down from the top of the organisation where perhaps it really shouldn't have been in the first place and to the individuals that actually run the company.

I'm really getting tired of Land + Econ topics flooding into General lately.

stop it!

this is where, if I could find one, i'd post a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Copy yelling "STOP IT!" to the kid stealing others' lunches. instead, you will settle for this crappy low-res image from some random scene:

Well, I thought it would be better than a doom and gloom post.l

This is the forum where we talk about how Philip looks not what he does.

Interesting ideas, Blaze.

-Ghoti

i support your topic and the framework you have set above. It would be interesting to see what kinds of organizations could be spurred. gj

I like your thinking, but don't you optionally belong to any corporation? I mean your never forced into your work relationships.

Also isn't this covered by a cooperative, profit-sharing, or even a limited partnership?

I agree teamwork is the wave of the future in SL, especially when 1.7 brings the php/mysql wizards to our world. I am all for exploring new economic/business structures in world too, I'm just trying to get a better understanding of what your proposing. Please elaborate

Moved to Land and Economy Forum.

See also this thread regarding Corporations in SL: /130/b6/49458/1.html

Well, quite often people don't really have a lot of options. My thoughts are that we need a new type of corporation so the options are all in the hands of the employees.



You don't usually work for a cooperative, and profit-sharing and limited partnerships are great, but they don't let you work for many different organisations at the same time.