SL Corporations

I posted a feature suggestion but haven't gotten much of a response from people there. So I figgured im probably in the wrong forum. So I have an idea to enable better business models in SL, check it out. /13/35/49353/1.html

i am surprised you haven't pulled up previous threads, because this issue continually comes up and is indeed holding back Second Life right now. LL is aware of it, although I do not know how they are planning on fixing things.

There are multiple issues at work... here are a few:
- the ability to have some sort of contract or at least mediation (i.e. recourse)
- the ability to control how profits/dividends are distributed
- the ability to have granular rights so employees don't get the keys to the kingdom
- the ability to have ownership percentages, improving capital raising and possibly kickstarting an in-world venture capital community (without the first point, however, it is hard to see this happening)

the first is complex, and i would gladly have the others and accept the increased risk

if we get the tools to manage a real corporation (i.e. a separate entity, outside of the people involved, like the C-corp structure we have in the US), rather than the sole proprietorships or occasional partnerships you see out there today, you might start seeing an investment community, increased merger & acquisition activity (which would really spur entrepreneurial activity in SL), and bigger projects enabled by collaborative efforts. Naturally, there will be bankruptcies too lol...


This is one of the areas where prokovy and I agree most vociferously (as opposed to our usual sparring ): the current group tools are nowhere near enough, and in some cases, downright debilitating.

I have not seen LL ask for help developing a detailed feature/function spec, however.

I agree the tools suck as you know, Forseti, because they didn't really want businesses (except their own as LL itself) but wanted a lot of utopianist communes. They seem to be revisiting this, somewhat, however.

What's amazing is that even with only the ability to have a handshake, people do thrive with businesses here. They make deals, they give each other percentages, they make profits, they are happy.

What you're missing is dispute resolution and arbitration, of course, don't forget that.

I agree. I would love to raise capital for expansion by selling a limited number of shares in my enterprises. Instead, I either have to go to IGE.com or borrow from the best of friends who want to see me succeed. I would rather not have to borrow, but instead be invested in and share in the profits through either dividends or buy back of stock. Hell, I think it would be rather interesting to have an in world SL Stock Exchange.

I'll say this again, I don't want the group tools to be changed. These are good for every average user. This is SL, mine, yours, and everyone elses. I know some people want to make a utopia in the sky, and others want to build a zen in the forest. But the fact is in SL as much in RL that you can't do a lot of things unless you either build it yourself, or pay someone to do it for you. With all the ideas I have seen in SL I keep wondering how well SL would be if there was a Home Depot (US) that employed 100 people. This would do wonders for the SL economy. Not only would you stop all the people whining about paying people to go to clubs to get some money, but everyone could have a job at any number of companies that were formed.

yes prok, i agree that it is impressive what has been accomplished with the limited tools we have. But it is a far cry from what would have been attempted and accomplished with better functionality in SL. As usual, I disagree with how intended/anti-business it was -- I see no proof of that.

It's led to the "medieval village" economy you dislike because people have to rely on trust and close relationships. It's a combination of human nature (we tend to prefer dealing with referrals and in-network) and an inevitable reaction to the high-risk group structures currently in place. Also agree on arbitration -- that's what i was including in my mediation/recourse line.

Joe, corporations are in effect group activities, so to embed support for these structures in the SL functionality, they would have to add new group/incorp features, or change the existing group functions.

there are many features that were not designed properly to scale. the group features and ability to do more complex buisness transactions is / will likely be looked at. All our discussion on the topic will hopefully be taken into consideration, but it will take time and more people showing intrest in large corps. It would add a new facet to the SL market perhaps adding complications SL isn't quite ready for.

A stockmarket is a good dream... Unfortunately under current state of marketcratic-anarchism it's a realy though dream to realize. In real life you can run but you can't hide, in sl you don't need to run you just hide (cancel account).

As with the RL stock markets, yes, there would be risk involved. No one should ever invest in a stock/company that they have not reviewed thoroughly. Of course, this doesn't explain Google.

I think though, just like in RL, if a company is to offer stock to the populace, that company becomes regulated. I am not sure if the Lindens want to take on that responsibility, but it is something to look into.

Stock markets are a good idea, but how about some simple company tools...

The Lindens have talked sometimes about how they are aware the group tools aren't functioning for corporations and land holding, that they'll consider changing them -- they've said this at town halls and on the Hotline. It's not clear whether it's a priority, however.

The most urgent matter is to get rid of officer recall, which currently can be triggered in a land group by any member who joins temporarily just for this form of griefing. The person who bought the land and pays the tier can be targed, and a coup engineered to separate him from his land.

Forseti, when you say "this wasn't deliberate," I'm sorry, I don't buy it.

It was indeed deliberate, given that such a utopianist notion of property was introduced. What's amazing is that they could have a land auction with bidding and parcels for sale, which presupposes some capitalist system, but then have that land go into groups, where it become's "no one's land," i.e. group property, and any officer in the group holding it can be dumped by a mass of rabble-rousers. Indeed this is conscious. Indeed they did think they could force social engineering in this way, force people to share the proceeds of every sale equally, force them to handle the land as if it belonged to all though only one paid for it and only one paid tier on it perhaps -- it's all there to be seen. I just do not buy what you are saying. Somebody sat up late nights talking about this and programming it and here is what it is.

You don't end up with a function in a system that can wipe out a man's land holdings in a second without a little forethought. It's not just a hole, it's not just a flaw that came because they thought of "group collaborative projects" in the tekkii wiki, it's a built-in, default ideology. It's a group with land that gets 10 percent bonus on that land, but there isn't a thought in its head about how one person can steal it all from the others and set it to sale. That's just criminal -- or else just dope-smoking casual, I don't know, but it shows a default, indifference or even hostility to property, to people who pay for property, for people who hold property.

Even if you can prove to me that this wasn't done deliberately, I'd have to say that it still shows a default ideology that is very careless and unconcerned about individual property rights as the basis for civilization.

maybe prok, maybe. I don't have enough data to draw a conclusion. Utopian anti-business does seem to jar pretty heavily with other language that's eminated from LL, so I remain skeptical. And even if that IS where they started (big assumption), they have clearly evolved away from it, perhaps faster than the product can keep up.

Have you ever designed a big software product? (I ask this sincerely, and I don't require an answer) The devil is in the details and there's always unintended consequences on a system like this especially when you are dealing with irrational, unpredictable things like human behavior! They had a huge system to develop and I'm not surprised they missed a lot of things. Most big software products really only get to a decent state after the second or third major rev.

In many ways they continue to learn from mistakes where they have misjudged human nature. They continue to adjust and try to improve. At the start they hadn't yet given IP rights to creators, and they had a prim tax system restricting creativity.

fundamentally, the folks at LL are just smart engineers and business people just like many of the "residents" in SL. I am sure when designing the system we would have caught things they missed, and sure that we would have missed things they would have caught.

thank you for discussing this so civilly.

anyway, sorry to tangent away from core question...

Forseti, I don't need to have "designed some large software project" to discuss this. I've worked on other kinds of systems and task lists and projects where you have to foresee unintended consequences. This isn't rocket science.

There is a definite, distinct, bias and built-in prejudice in the group tools. Its name is "California" or "San Francisco" or "Haight-Ashbury" -- who knows, but it's a bias. It's a bias that first sought to take all property and income and distribute it equally. It did that reflexively, without thought, instinctively.

How do I know? Because a Linden told me that the program to make "monarch" and have just the owner or founder control the tools is *easier*. In fact, it took *deliberate, conscious, planning and add-ons* to do the kind of program that circulated everything equally and made officer recall and treacherous officer sell-outs possible.

I know if I were sitting down to make group tools in a world/civilization/metaverse I'd back away in horror at such a prospect instantly. It would cause instant revulsion in me. Because I'd know that a seemingly sunny social-justice everybody-is-equal path only leads to crime. It leads to the crime of theft. When property is no one's, when it is "the public's" or "the group,s" no one really respects it fully and anyone can then steal it in the name of "the public" or even in the name of just their own greed. Once property rights are not protected, anything goes. The only way societies get independence from the state, their creator, is when they have private property -- he who has freedom of the press owns one, etc.

The group tools were originally designed for tekkie wiki collaborations -- "oh, look, let's add that, " "no, that won't work, let's add this." Then land was grafted on to them, and the ten percent bonus, and tier donation. After all, they didn't *start* with a land market, I believe you could just roam around and claim patches in the very beginning.

But just because they didn't start with it and didn't foresee everything doesn't mean that their worldview slip is not showing, big time. It sure is. Other people, not in California, not in tekkie land, not in San Francisco, would have made a different world with different group tools. The cultural bias is distinct -- leftist, lunatic, liberal.

If their entrepreneurial zeal then became a curb on their own leftist utopianism -- great. But if you don't think there are some downright squirrely ideas at work here about new forms of social management blah blah go read Philip's blog, the one citing the 1937 essay about the firm. Trust me, there are no accidents here, comrade.

Yes, they do learn from mistakes. Or let me rephrase that. The young man's fascination with communist and leftist and utopianist ideals gives way to the middle aged man's practical recognition induced by sobering reality. They start to realize they can't get the stuff paid for. Nobody wants to be in the hippie commune, really. They like the ideal, but they want to make stuff, keep the copyright, and get rich, without having to work for the public good. And who can blaim them?

Just imagine if the content creation tools also involved circulating profits equally through a group, in which anyone in the group could steal the content and sell it. Huh! Imagine the howling in the land we would hear then!

But these content barons don't want to apply the same principles to land. They'd like land barons only to suffer -- to take away bulk discount, the 10 percent incentive, etc. and they'd like them not to have better tools like the removal of officer recall -- some of them are still howling that this is going to create dictators. Bah to that. They're the dictators when they take a man's land away from him that he paid for.

I refuse to believe this is a software detail problem or a planning problem on a task list. That's because it's about fundamental ideological worldviews. I have no doubt in my mind that these are people who are on the left, and who have absorbed all the half-baked, half-communist ideologies that are out there on the average college campus. They've never really had to think about how you fight for and keep freedom because it's always been delivered to them, often by their parents paying for it.

Forseti, I've always been civil. But as soon as I countered this received wisdom, this reflexive belief and criticized it, people became uncivil to me. The record shows this.

The ability to enforce binding contracts, with agreed-upon penalties for failing to fulfill those contracts, would be a necessary prerequisite to making a virtual corporation work. The directors need to be accountable to both shareholders and customers, and there has to be a mechanism to remove them if they're not responsive or competent (regardless of their personal investment - though a smart director includes a golden parachute to recoup his stake).

Without the ability to recall leaders, what you have is not a corporation but a fiefdom. That should definitely be an option for people who want to build kingdoms... but it shouldn't be the only option, or even the default.

There's no reason (at least in a virtual world) that a worker's paradise can't coexist peacefully side by side with a corporate business empire. We need the tools for both.

In RL, Arcadia, if I have to remove a trustee from a board of trustees, I call a vote of no-confidence, I use the board meetings, I use Roberts Rules of Order. He could also call a vote on me. But when he does that, it doesn't mean that he then gets to usher in a rabble of his friends and seize the property I paid for, and put tier/maintenance on. That would be absurd. He wouldn't be able to merely seize my investment and my share just because he wanted me to be voted out of office. The director voted out of office gets a golden parachut, not a kick off the 101st floor.

Directors need to be accountable, but so do members and other officers. They don't get to steal the group's land in coups like Bolsheviks. There have to be accountable procedures.

Currently, in the Linden group tools, anyone can join a group and trigger an officer recall. I had this happen to me yet again last night by some fucktard -- and that really is the best, most apt word for such a person that thinks, for the sake of these forums, they can come in and paralyze a group of 115 people.

It causes mayhem, because some people worry their rented land will be changing hands, sold, lost. Others are confused -- should they vote yes or no? *During that period, no new members can come in.* That means no tenants can come in and rent and keep their prims on the land, so it damages business.

Fortunately, there is a workaround -- I can leave the group, and another trusted officer invites me and my tier back in. If I am recalled -- and forced to leave the group with all my tier -- I have to make sure that a trusted officer and my alt can invite me back in before the Lindens seize the land.

Meanwhile, the rogue member, once he got rid of me, can invite in 20 friends, run an election to make him an officer, get the 2/3 vote easily, and with his elevated officer status, now boot out all the people in the group he doesn't like who won't vote for him. Bolshevism, pure and simple. In fact, if the Lindens wanted to create a toy that demonstrated the functions and features of Bolshevism and how they worked in the real world, they couldn't have found a better model! Honestly, I kid you not!

Next, with his hand free to run the group, even without my tier -- there's a 72 -hour window -- he can now proceed to sell off my land. Of course, he may not get a good price for it, but when you're heisting a hot land, you don't mind fencing it for whatever price you can get. Even $1 is fine. The officer has the right to put the land to sale.

By the time I can get back online, finding the friendly officer online to invite me, etc. all my land could have been released for a dollar a meter or -- what's more likely -- simply transferred to another group IF they had the tier.

Just let me then try to get the Lindens to get me back my land, hmmm? They'll say "Go Fish" like they did to the woman who set the 0 wrong.

These are all real features in the game. There is nothing to celebrate about them. They are criminal. They're an example of how socialism leads to crime -- and it's good to have such educational examples, actually because it can concentrate the mind wonderfully.

To go on yammering about tyrannical officers in this crime-ridden situation then is simply to partake of the crime. You surely don't want people who have land and tier to be summarily stripped of their land and tier by criminals who take over their groups. Yet that is what you are sanctioning by not challening these tools, and by trying to cling to their putative use in the bright and radiant future where you get a dictator removed by elections.

In the RL, dictators are never removed by elections anyway, Arcadia. That's one of those liberal fallacies. They're toppled by people who by that time have already pretty much established a liberal democracy functioning on its own apart from the dictatorial state.

With the revision of the group tools, the owner or founder of the group will decide who can be recalled. Since he did the original inviting, it makes sense. It would be nice to have voting function, but they don't work. They work to remove people unlawfully. Or they don't work propertly most probably because people misuse the vote proposal function to write notes to the group so they circulate to all those offline (a better communications tool is needed).

Don't get me wrong. The need to have checks and balances is a real one. The need to have ways to control tyrants is urgent. These aren't the tools to do that, however. Currently, all the do is disrupt business, get misused, and threaten people will loss of their land they paid for.

The reality is, the most common model you find in the game is someone making a group with his 2 alts. Is that unfair? No. Because the person can trust their two alts, and they can't trust most others.

The second most common model is having one person do the lion's share of purchases and tier holding and then they invite in a few friends to share the burden. In those situations, people solve the tyrant problem simply by leaving and moving. They don't solve it by stealing land and selling it during the untiered window before the Lindens seize it. Most people don't even want to do that to tyrants, because they know it's wrong to make seizures without due process.

Now there are some hoary cliches. Suppose you didn't notice that the pinko hippy commune that is California elected a Republican governor, eh? Anyway, besides being ancient, out of date, and ineffective, your off-topic bait is getting disappointingly less original. Next you're going to be reduced to trying a blue-eyes brown-eyes experiment.

Joe, I agree, good company tools would be great. Just as one can create a group, one should be able to create a company. Instead of those who join as simple members, they can join as investors, with no real say in the company, only hoping that they will get a return on their investment. That's why I thought of the idea of shares, which people could then buy and trade. I really do think its the next level of commerce in SL, beyond the simple "mideval" town square idea.

Kim, try to analyze a little more and realize that part of the reason they end up with a Republican governor is backlash for decades of liberalism that drove some people nuts. But you're looking at this all in RL literal political terms.

What I'm talking about is culture, not politics. "California" has an iconic role in the American imagination as being a destination of the Westward-ho! movement, the land of Hollywod, the land of hippies in Haight-Ashbury, the land of Los Angeles, the Redwoods, and everything else -- not to mention Silicon Valley, and the liberalism associated precisely with San Franciso and its mayors.

To pretend that is not the case is to be out of touch with the rest of America, but then...I often find that problem happens to people on the far left.

The people in San Francisco perceive themselves to be in a more liberal environment, to be more unorthodox, to be experimental, avant-garde, etc. You aren't finding gay marriages and their supporters in Toledo, Kim, you find them in San Francisco. There's also the whole culture of New Age, computers, the Internet, Silicon valley -- it's all associated with California high tech. So it's *this culture* that the Lindens find themselves and to say they are abstracted from that, unrelated to that, immaterial to that is just to have your head in the sand. Even if you can find midwesterners and even Cory with his Naval background on all the Linden bios on their website, the point is, they exist, move, live, have their being in "California".

So actually, I'm quite up to date. The point stands. Game developers are influenced by the cultural milieu in which they find themselves. They create structures and systems out of the culture they know. The culture they know said: "value equal distribution of property". The culture they know said: "put officer recall in to get rid of tyrants like the evil bosses we've known in our lives". The culture they know said: "have incentives for wikkies and collaborative projects". The culture they know said: "Let's be sure to have copyrights for content-creation -- that's something we know and respect."

The culture didn't say: "Let's protect the land-owning individual and his assets from theft." Indeed, if they ever thought about it, they probably thought they didn't like large land-owners very much, and whatever benefits they, in their generation made from the capitalists and philanthropists from the past, they didn't seek to replicate their methods in the present -- and with some loss, therefore, of appreciation for what it takes to run a railroad.

I'm trying to ignore it, because there is some meat behind the mindless red-bashing and anti-intellectualism. The group tools DO need to be revised. My view is that they need to be revised to be more flexible and offer more options in regards to officer recall and other features, rather than just disabling it altogether, so the "bolsheviks" that favor a democratic structure can still build one... and those who'd rather have a corporate or totalitarian hierarchy can construct that as well. Once we have the tools, we can argue over which is a better choice

Using repeated elections to disrupt a group (under current rules) is a form of harassment and ought to be dealt with harshly by LL, regardless of who it's directed at.

No, Arcadia, I'm afraid I won't let you make such up a mindless analogy of "red-bashing"=anti-intellectualism.

In fact, Red-bashing is quite an intellectual achievement and you have to work very hard at it to fight through the thicket of mundane and mindless cliches and memes fostered by mindless Red ideas. I"m not kidding. And you can be a red-basher, and be an intellectual, too. I combine the two features brilliantly myself

Nope, I'm all for Red-bashing, because there are plenty, plenty, plenty of historical reasons for bashing Reds, starting first and foremost with the *millions they massacred*. But hey, details, details.



Yes, and part of the way you revise them is not overlooking the analysis needed to understand how they got that way, or they'll get that way again.



Um, what's your idea about the "flexibility"? You either have it, or you don't. You either have an automatic recall vote triggered, or you don't.



Um, I catch sleights of hand like that, Arcadia. Now you're saying that *your* way is "democracy* and everybody else who wants to change these actually very undemocratic tools is then "undemocratic".

Stealing property someone has paid for is undemocratic, Arcadia. It's against the American Way LOL. It's more like, um, some other countries I can think of.

Boards of trustees in corporations are actually quite democratic entities. And it's the power and responsibility that they vest in investors and shareholders that is the core of the democratic world and the protection of private property, innovation, work, and value creation.

There's no reason to denounce a corporate/shareholder model with these tools as "undemocratic". Indeed, it's exactly that kind of talk that brought us the hippie commune thingie we have now in which people's groups can be paralyzed by griefers and property can be seized.

Any notion of "democracy" such as Nberg is purveying hinges not on these group tools, but on their own mindset and their own social control over each other through communications and relationships in the game. It's not the tools that are keeping the officers from stealing each other's land, or the members from recalling officers who pay tier.

In fact, given what we've learned about how private islands, and how only one person can own them, and no group can own them, and group members can't donate tier on them (groups can only get a deed with the single owner as an officer of their group at least temporarily), I can see the whole thing hinges on a handshake. In fact, it sounds a lot more like a game of Tropico with "You Rule" and El Presidente than anything normal people would call "democracy". In fact. the themed communities with tier donors and people sharing in Grid Commune have more of a democracy than Private Island Commune.



When I wrote about this in polysci, I figured the Lindens would have to make something for everybody, so the group tools will be used to make dominions of doms and subs as well as arts councils or businesses or monarchies. If that's what it takes to fix the tools, having them also keep some of their features that will be used to make the building blocks of oppressive worlds, than I guess I don't have a choice but to endorse it under the "free choice" doctrine, but then I"d work steadily, in more authentic liberal democratic groups, to try to prevent the unfree groups from taking over, which of course, is likely to be their aim.



I'm wondering how they can tell who did this. I can't see who triggers the election -- indeed the anonymnous office recaller function is one of the most criminal built into this -- enabling anyone to disrupt a group and engineer a coup with impunity.

Prokofy, you don't know what you're talking about. But that's immaterial, because, as I said, your bait is off topic. This is a thread about mediation, contracts, and group tools in Second Life, not about inaccurate stereotyping of people in San Francisco and Toledo. If you want to try to invite people to discuss bigotry and its use as divisive rhetoric, I suggest you do it in the Off Topic forum.

On topic . . . I'd like to see more flexible group tools in SL, and I'm sure that we'll get them. Probably the Lindens place a higher priority on trying to figure out how to fix sim memory leaks and object editing bugs than revising the group tools. As far as contracts, well, when I've done business on a substantial scale here in SL, I got a signature on a RL contract. I think the problem with that, for some, is that you have to use RL names. I guess the difference is a matter of viewpoint . . . if it's just an online "game" where we're playing with Monopoly money, then you might see in-game contracts and mediation. But with the involvement of real money and real business, I'm afraid it's more like doing business on the Web, where you just have to use RL contracts and courts. Personally, if a substantial sum is involved, I'd rather count on the RL legal system than the SL TOS and opinions of a Linden Lab staff judge or a jury of SL members.

I am all for growing business in SL. I agree that the group tools can use some modification, but IMO alot of what people want in the way of corporate tools would be not only be impossibly cumbersome for LL to manage, but I don't see where they would promote much more economic activity. The only exception I see is that it would possibly make more people feel that an investment in an SL corporation is somehow safe because LL implements some sort of tools.

Binding agreements and contracts are what the vast majority of posters on this subject would like to see. I have serious doubts about the realistic implementation and benefits of such agreements. Can someone please post an example of how they they think this would work AND a hypothetical example of a corporation using this feature. I see this type of feature turning SL into a giant pool of SLitigation.

The creator of this thread mentions adding corporate tools, what tools specifically would you like to see implemented? Please also site a hypothetical example of how you see these tools helping SL.

Once again, I am 110% probusiness, I just do not see what so many of you see in these changes. Show me the light.

Ok, I don't want to see the group tools changed. Even with their faults and short comings they serve their purpose as they were desinged. I would like to see a business feature set added to SL that would allow someone to start a business in SL. Some of the features I am looking for are these.

Ability to pay employees a base salary, commission, or a combination of the both.

A flexible system that allows different titles in the company with different permissions. Obviously the owner can run everything, but how about having a marketing director in the company that can use L$XXX per week on advertising.

Also, I know people would like to see contracts in the game. I don't think this is going to happen for a number of reasons that I won't get into. Although I think an ebay approach to feedback would be the best way to keep peoples transactions honest.

As far as allowing people to invest. Yes, this is a great idea. Is there a lot of questions and concerns this creators? Absolutely. I don't see this feature being added anytime soon, there would be a lot of design involved and i'm sure a number of bugs to be worked out. Should they keep the company tools open to allow further development of adding shares? I think they should.

I would like to see the company be able to hold its own account of L$. The owner would be able to set his weekly salary for running the company. All purchases for the company should come from the company account. All items purchased by the company should be then owned by the company.

As far as having a board of voting members. This would be a good idea for larger corporations. However, I don't think this should be standard in every company. I think the owner of the company should have the option to "go public" and open up his company to outside investment. With this would come the board members and investors that have the ability to vote on company issues and courses of action.

With this last one you wouldn't need a stock market. All you would need is to have the ability to let outside patrons make an investment into your company.

A lot of people speculate what LL had intended for this "Game" to be. Either way it really doesn't matter any more. SL has an economy and it has the utopian builders. We can all live in the same place side by side if need be. SL is a host to a wide variety of people that can dream and make great things. I don't want to take that away from anyone and I don't want to force anything upon any person. This is why I asked for peoples opinions in making a new set of tools designed for business owners.

I've said this a thousand times and i'll say it again. I don't want the group tools to change. They serve their purpose, and a lot of the problems that come from them (i.e. recalls) can be solved with a new tool set for businesses.

As a note to add to my last post:

I wouldn't mind paying a startup fee of say L$250-L$2000 or pay a weekly/monthly business tax in L$. This tax could be a percentage of revenue generated by the company and could be put towards a number of community projects including event hosting or educational purposes.

I looked through the voting system and didn't see anything like what I want, so i've decided to take action as you should too if this is a feature you want. Please vote on prop 392 to support this effort.

http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=392