Why representative democracy?

Malachi Petunia from another thread:

Parliament of Whores is an excellent read for those who wish to see the foibles of representative democracy in practice. The author approaches the subject with a stance of "suppose everyone in the US government was trying to do good and right" which makes for a rather charitable if incisive look at government. Even with his humorist's eye, O'Rourke comes to some startling conclusions which certainly changed my view of governance.

My question:

Why are we all assuming that "representative democracy" ought to be the template for order, governance, and law in SL? It's a virtual world, right? New, shiny, and experimental? Why then look back several hundred years to the Enlightenment for inspiration?

And to anticipate someone's comment, are socialism, fascism, aristocracy, oligarchy or totalitarianism the only alternatives?

Other viable alternatives for a player-participation political culture?

[Disclaimer: no one should impute my personal opinions on the issue of player governance from this post. k? thx.]

Great question! I think the reason most folks look forward and not backwards is democracy. Once you accept democracy as a good thing, most large governments which predate the industrial revolution are out.

I'm going to give you an example of the novel government that we formed for our city. The goal was to create a system which would give as much power as possible to people, while protecting the minority, and preventing corruption.

Legislative

To begin, we start with the assumption that citizens always prefer to have a say in their government. Either directly or through representatives, having some form of government with democracy in it is a good thing. Why representative? Any group larger than a few hundred people and pure democracy is too difficult (costly, slow, etc.) to implement effectively. Plan for the future.

This branch is referred to as the Legislative branch in the U.S. In both the U.S. and in Germany, the legislative branch is bicameral, meaning it is comprised of two separate groups. In the U.S. the Congress is comprised of the House and Senate. In Germany the Parlament is comprised of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat.


Judicial

Democracy in itself is a very bad thing. It equates to unchecked mob rule, where the minority always suffer at the hands of the majority. A professor once described pure democracy to me as three wolves and a sheep voting for what to have for dinner.

The key to taming a democracy is to create a list of rights that can not be taken away from citizens. In the U.S. we have the constitution, which guarantees the right to assemble and the right to free speech. This promotes the government from a democracy to a republic, where minorities are protected by a list of inalienable rights.

If you become a democratic republic, you instantly require a second branch to your government make sure the democratic side doesn't do anything which would violate an individual's inalienable rights. This second branch is almost always a meritocracy or a group which is chosen based on merit. This is similar to the judicial branch in the U.S. government and the Bundesverfassungsgericht in Germany.

In our group we expanded the powers of this branch, allowing it to select its own candidates, with the other two branches voting on approval. It also has the right to overrule laws based on scientific principle or grounds!


Executive

In the U.S. and Germany there exists an executive branch. In our city we did away with that branch. It's just too much power for a single person to have. God forbid a lunatic like Adolf Hitler, George W. Bush, or Katie Couric is elected. Instead we make the head of the party with the most votes in the Legislative branch the figurehead of the city. It comes with no additional power.


Artisans

In our city we had a single-body representative legislature and a judicial meritocracy, however we felt a third branch would be required to balance power between the first two. Because content is king (and money) in SL, the third branch was chosen to be a group of artisans in a relatively flat collective (an ergatocracy). They were given control of the city infrastructure and finances. The benefit is that each group has a role in the government (represent, judge, and treasury) and each has a role in supporting the city (long-term planning, conflict resolution, content creation). It seemed like a great way to tie together government with practical SL needs, while creating multiple avenues for citizens to contribute to the city.

Checks and Balances

Finally, we created a list of checks and balances, where every branch had it's finger in every other branch's pie. No one could do anything without at least one of the other branches agreeing.

How's that for something that builds upon the last 200 years of governmental development while still breaking new ground?

~Ulrika~

i'm not making that assumption. but anyhow...
i think it's because most people are most familiar with representative democracy.

Democracy is were the Civilians have a vote on EVERY issue.
Republic is were the Civilians have a vote for a Representative who will vote on the issues.
Democratic Republic the Civilians have a vote for a Representative who will vote on most issues but some issues are left to the Civilians.

The Ancient Greeks, Athens really, was a Democracy
Rome started off under Etesian Monaural rule and then freed it’s self to become a Republic. Later if Changed to a Republic with a Empyreal Head.
The US is a Presidential Democratic Republic. One man has as much power as a group of governmental comity (the House and Senate)
The UK is a Prim Minister Democratic Republic. One man has less rights then the governmental comity (Parliament) but still has more rights then one member of the governmental comity.

Stop the use of Democracy! We are in RL a Democratic Republic!
If anything right now we are a Monarchy now. But luckily we have great King/Queen and Lords/Ladies that leave us to out fun and require little of us. All in all not bad!

Now that I have posted about my like pet pev. I want to way Ulrika what you said was, well great. Well done. I give you a A+++++++++++++ some one here has not been spending there time feeding off the tit of TV or Government. Some one here really knows something about Governments. Well done.

(1) I'll call it a representative democracy, thank you. The term incorporates various "styles" of the liberal paradigm that swept the western world during the so-called Enlightenment. Another common term is "liberal capitalism," but I've given up all hope of an alternative economic system in SL.

(Just kidding on that last part. )

(2) Neither Athens nor Rome was a democracy or a republic, at least in the sense that we used those words today. No lectures, just a mere statement of fact.

(3) I understand, StoneSelf. My question was more along the lines of, "are there are paradigms that might be better suited to virtual worlds than the ones we've been acculturated to in early 21st century RL?"

(4) Thank you for taking my question seriously, Ulrika. What you've said is very interesting. I would like to point out, however, that the institutions you describe are still founded upon familiar western paradigms. They're "tweaks" rather than new concepts. However, perhaps you are right: perhaps there are no better paradigms than those that exist....

But I'm not yet convinced.

perhaps people are more comfortable with that which they are comfortable. people tend to shove even new ideas into old patterns... more out of habit than bad intention.

The only real difference from the US seems to be the Artisan branch. That makes some sense, though, considering that the old issues of food and shelter don't matter here. All your stuff comes from... uh, the people who make the stuff. So it makes sense that they would have a branch of their own.

None of that is for me, though. I'm logged on at odd hours, and I don't have the time or money to devote to organizations. It does sound like an interesting project, however.


<petpeev>

Oh, and please refrain from the Bush/Hitler comparisons. I've heard so much of that lately, and it's frankly quite tiresome. It's one thing to hear it from people who don't bother with history books, but the folks on this thread know better.

Bush is a maverick cowboy, and lots of people hate him, but I've read too much history to put him in the same category as Hitler. There is no Final Solution here in the States. There are no politics of a master race. These bits of history should be taken seriously. Andrew Jackson was a complete dick, and gave Native Americans no end of trouble... but I wouldn't compare him to the current Prime Minister of Germany.

</petpeev>

I do not care what you want to call it. Go take a early US History class and you will find out that our founding fathers called it Democratic Republic. Or how about taking a Poly-Sci Class. I have taken both. You can call things all you want that does not change what they are.



Again does not really mater what you think something is or is not. The Fact is Rome was the first ever Republic. Athens was the first ever Democracy. At least as fare as we know. The USA was the first to take the two and put them together.

Now the thing is you need to look at what type of Democratic Republic, We have changed over the years to a Federal type. In SL it really does not mater. A Fun on Republic would work with no votes for any one but the vote for there officials. OR even a Democracy would work but should not be done. I good fashion of the two together works best. Take the time and study Politics and don’t try and come up with your own names. I worked with some one that tried to change the name of political Philosophy. All it does is showed how little he know and confused.

SL is the perfect place to explore new paradigms for self government! Once our project stabilizes, I'd like to start adding new sims to the mix with different flavors of government to see how they fare.

I luv this forum.

~Ulrika~

An ideal SL government? Sure, I'll take a shot. Because I just got out of college, and I know everything

An ideal SL government would be based on the natural checks and balances between three Features: Plebiscite, Contract, and Configuration.

Plebiscite
-----------
An avie could cast one vote on any issue which (a) was broadcast with the avie as a part of the target audience, and (b) was able to get past the avie's personal filtering system.

Contract
-----------
A thoroughly configurable contract system permitted avies to enter into arbitrarily customizable contracts for the exchange of goods and services. Further, an avie offering land for sale could fine tune a proposed contract and bind it to the property. A potential purchaser could either accept the contract directly to purchase the land (or even click some optional clauses with an appropriate automatic modification to the asking price), or could contact the seller for negotiation. At any rate, an accepted contract would be bound into the property fabric for a stated period after the purchase, and could automatically inhibit or enable arbitrary features in the property's configuration set (see below).

Configuration
-----------------
With the exception of chat and IM, all details of an avie's personal history (SL history only!) could be configured to be available to current and historic scans by the avie's arbitrary choice of other avies and their owned objects. The avie could maintain an arbitrary number of such profiles, targeting different individuals or groups.

A landowner would have an exhaustive configuration tool for all aspects of property, down to the finest detail...including access, script priority, sub-let configuration privs for arbitrary individual/group/parcel combinations, allowed textures, permitted chat channels, visitation times, prim limits...well, you get the idea. But: the configuration options available to the landowner would be governed by the contract which the landowner signed at the time the property was purchased.

All three Features would interact totally orthogonically. (I'm not a C.Sc. major, and I hope I used, and spelled, that word right.)

All sorts of interesting enclaves and social experiments could compete in such an environment.

And some interesting reputation-based service industries could arise...for instance, in the USA's early days, simple geography made representative government necessary, regardless of the other arguments for or against it. Now, I think, folks would want something analagous to classic representation simply to avoid information overload. A class (or caste, or whatever) of professional filterers/precis writers of varying ideologies could contract themselves out to act as reporter/editors on Gridwide or regional issues...and, if properly contracted, could even cast their client avies' votes in their behalf.

The Lindens' governance would focus on (a) responding as sincerely as possible to the prioritized feature lists and agendas distilled by plebiscite, and (b) executing TOS-level discipline against breach of contract, where the contract mechanism itself couldn't provide it automatically (again, in an ideal system, I could contract away anything from an amount in escrow to some control level on one of my properties if I failed to meet my part of the contractual requirements...the system could, in some cases, execute the penalty against me instantaneously.)

-- jj

We are actually implementing land deeds (contracts) precisely in the way you mentioned in our city. However, I recognize that your vision goes well beyond a traditional contract.

As a matter of fact your post was a visionary look at how virtual technology could transform player interaction in a way unique to our virtual world. Damn good stuff. I'm going to steal it all.

~Ulrika~

I've taken a few, Lupo.

Didn't mean to challenge deep preconceptions. Sorry you're upset, but I stand on what I said about the convenience of the general labels as they are used by professionals.



No, again, I'll stand on the common professional interpretation here. Rome was a republic only in the sense that the elites who met the standards of wealth had some say. The political energy of masses was deliberately diverted into counsels that made noise but had little or no say, except when they were roused by a demagogue or a military "dictator". And then there were the slaves.... Somewhat the same with Athens: once you deduct slaves, women, foreigners, and men who did not meet the property standards, perhaps 15% of the population participated in any real decision making. And the process was subverted so many times and in so many ways that it was often meaningless.

I think you're mistaking the fact that the American "founding fathers" looked to Rome and Athens for historical inspiration and general philosophical themes. The federated republic they tried to set up, in 1775 and by 1791, mirrored some of those themes but in few ways reflected the practical political dynamic.

Cheers and good luck to you in your studies.

I've taken a few, too.



I guess like most things it depends on your criteria for judgement. Democracy in the direct or representative sense in Rome and Athens was severely limited by wealth, class, gender and other factors; less than one in ten people actually participated in a meaningful way. And the unwritten processes were subverted so often that both examples could be characterized as barely functioning. The American "founding fathers" used Rome and Athens as historical touchstones and propaganda points, but not necessarily as blueprints. In fact, they worried that the "historical lessons" of Rome and Athens demonstrated that democracy and republicanism was doomed to failure.

At the risk of sounding too philosophical, I was thinking about Plato and Henri Rousseau and Tom Hobbes and others who tried to define a reason for government - given how so much of the debate in the SL forums is about whether we actually need one or not.

It occurred to me that SL eliminates a number of the more important justifications for goverment: physical security, the preservation of life (a commodity that cannot be replaced), and the control and distribution of resources that are needed to sustain life, like food or shelter. Hobbes's choice between giving up liberties to goverments or living a "short, nasty, brutish," insecure life means something very different in RL than in SL, so no wonder people here are opposed to the concept of government. They can afford to be.

On the other hand, government in the 20th century was given the additional responsibilities of insuring the social welfare of the people and the general profit of a shared economy. This was largely because modern civilization had become established and more profitable, and the "peasants", being skilled, educated, and aware, had much higher expectations of the return for giving up some of their liberties. It seems to me that while the older, Hobbsian role of government is not relevant to SL, the later, labor-and-social redefinition might be.

It's fair to say that any government in SL must guarantee a more pleasant (quality of "life" and profitable (grow the economy and let all have an equal opportunity to share) experience for individual residents; otherwise, it has no reason to exist. In other words, there's still a choice, but it's not Hobbsian: rather than live restricted and survive or live free and die, the choice is live restricted and gain profit and pleasure, or live free and not have nearly as worthwhile an experience here.

The problem is in "operationalizing" the promise: how would an SL government guarantee a more worthwhile experience in return for certain liberties? Honestly, I'm not sure. Any attempt to operationalize the promise will almost certainly yeild no better result than pleasing most and displeasing a few. Which means at best such a promise is not a contract between government and the individual, as it was in the Hobbsian model, but a vague and collective ideal to benefit the majority.

Unless you redefine government, not as an overarching authority, but as a grassroots social movement or behavioral model, perhaps. Something that occurs between individuals and/or groups, instead of something that is "done" to them or for them.

I'm reaching. Ulrika is right: SL is an interesting platform for experimentation. But I don't think we're anywhere near the virtual government paradigms that might exist in the future. So far, I see us as prisoners of the past.

government is a response to conflicting desires among iindividuals and/or groups.

i don't think people are clear on what a government would be for, much less on how to implement it.

ulrika's approach is to define a solution before determining what the problem is.
much of the kneejerk response against government has been to say there is no problem, thus don't try to solve it.

there is plenty of evidence that sl residents affects the decisions and policies of sl.
is this a problem?
is there a problem with the way this is done?
looking down the road, will there be a problem down the road?
are/would these problem big enough to be worried about?

I hope you don't see this post of mine as "bragging" or as anything else but a simple statement on the results of a 7-month old project in SL.

I'm part of the Neualtenburg project, as some of you know. There have been hours and hours of discussions, arguments, and counter-arguments as to what would be the basis of an SL-based government, which encapsulated all of Ulrika's ideas and that gave us a basis or a starting point to grow from there. Think of those discussions as the same type of discussions that the US Founding Fathers may have had before they started to write the US constitution It gave us a starting point, and we can always improve on it later.

Lots of political science information is readily available on the net (mostly through Wikipedia ) and a rather large group (in SL terms) has participated in reading stuff, doing research, adding common sense, and the result can be seen on the forum for the Neualtenburg Group - which once had more posts than all the group forums taken together

So, what was the "problem" in the first place that needed a "government" to address? Looking backwards this seems easy to reply. There were (and still are!) two major problems. One is simply a certain distrust of "too strong leaders" who cannot share visions properly. This ruins a group very easily, even after they have achieved a lot. SL's population is really a mix of egotists and altruists, perhaps to a point which is not so clearly seen in RL - at least to my experience. I mean, it looks like we have a much larger share of both egotists and altruists in SL - the Gauss curve describing the overall population in SL is much "flatter" in that respect, too many extremists - so, instead of lamenting, we should deal with it.

The other thing is what happens with all sort of "voluntary projects" - local clubs, associations, open source projects. These sort of groups tend to be very dynamic in membership - a "core group" leads the project, but people tend to join it and drop from the group, as they find more interesting things to do (either in RL and SL).

So, for long-term projects, you need a mechanism to make sure that new members are able to keep up the good work, while, at the same time, be able to improve and adapt the whole project, as conditions change. There are several ways to do this. One very simple way, which has been used sporadically for the past 2750 years or so, is by having a "democratically-elected Government" We at Neualtenburg thought to give this very old idea a try We're also glad to see how many countries, projects, associations, clubs, non-profit organisations, etc. all around the globe also use this very same model for working things out in long-term projects, where members tend to join and leave very easily.

On more stable groups - ie. the ones that will have a guaranteed certain minimum number of members, during a long period of time - an alternate method may be better suited - it's called the "Corporation" Why reinvent the wheel? Both methods have co-existed for ages, and each is more adequate for a certain type of project. In the case of a volunteer-based project, which expects to have a long lifetime (and believe me, anything over 6 months in SL is really old - just to give you an idea, half of SL's population didn't exist 6 months ago!!), organised, democratically-elected groups are one of the best ways to deal with these issue.

That's the results we can expect right now. Yes, the Neualtenburg project has had ups and downs, as members from the "core team" dropped from it, or joined again at a later stage. It changed its own views on several subjects - again, as new people joined and gave it a different "twist" (different people have different ideas). Conditions in SL changed - Lindens have dropped resident-based support on projects, for instance - and, again, the project had to readapt itself. Some things were simple errors that were made - wrong estimates, overall optimism on some issues, too much pessimism on others - and, again, adjustments had to be made. Some people dropped the project because they didn't see it as being pulled in the "right" direction. Some people joined it much later, because they felt that "now" the project was going towards the "right" direction. It's impossible to please them all. The best that a "democratically-elected" managed group can do is adjust itself to the current reality.

A friend of mine in SL recently told me that there is no problem in doing things wrongly. What is really bad is being unable to accept one's errors and not try to correct them. The ones that at least make this effort will succeed - even if they started on the wrong foot, so to speak. Actually, she was talking about Philip Linden and the "vision" of Linden Lab But this applies as well to the current government-managed group of Neualtenburg. It's far from perfect. But we're seeing the consequences of our errors, mistakes, and miscalculations, and act upon those, trying to improve them. A first phase showed us that LOTS of assumptions were plainly wrong, and, as Ulrika has so often wrote here (and posted on her signature as well, hehe), we're now entering Phase II, with several new assumptions and a different business model. The Government still stands, although it is certainly very different from when we started, both in its members, as well as in the way the form they deal with all these issues.

As a conclusion... the "problem" we have with a long-term project is exactly how to deal with conflicting issues among members, as StoneSelf described so correctly. The "solution" that Ulrika is pointed out is that a Government can deal with those conflicting issues, in order to make the project long-term (and not just something "cool" done by a group of 2-3 people, who after a few months gets tired of it and go on towards other things). If the people at Neualtenburg didn't want a long-term project - but rather something cool to build, say, entering a designer's contest, or something like that which LL is always promoting - there would be no real interest in going all this effort to "hammer out" the building pillars of a working Government.

Ulrika is not proposing solutions for non-existing problems. I guess that she has only assumed that the "problem" was easily seen by everybody: how to make long-term projects in SL be viable, and grow and expand, when there are only non-paid volunteers to work with, and the return in money is mostly unpredictable (or, for some, not important at all).

Again, I'd like to point out that most of the debate has been framed in terms of the need for government to "solve a problem". And, while there may be problems in RL serious enough to convince people to give up personal choices in exchange for solutions (liberty for safety), there are no such problems in Second Life.

So I'm coming to believe two things:

First, for as long as proponents of government frame their arguments in terms of Hobbsian choices and problem-solving, an RL approach that does not work in SL, they will likely fail to interest the majority of people here. There are no "problems" in SL that government can solve.

Second, the real solution for proponents of government is to promise positive benefits for residents, and argue convincing ways to operationalize those promises.

And third, the way to operationalize those promises is to conceive of government in ways that may not resemble twelfth century concepts of local guild relations, eighteenth century concepts of democracy and republicanism, or nineteenth century concepts of liberal capitalism.

It really is a matter of thinking outside the box, I'm beginning to think.

N-burg's justification for government seems to contained in the following statement by Gwyneth: you need a mechanism to make sure that new members are able to keep up the good work, while, at the same time, be able to improve and adapt the whole project, as conditions change. To me, that implies that new members are the "problem", and government exists to make sure that these members are aligned and maintained within the commonweal. Necessary for RL conditions where survival is at stake, as Plato and Hobbes pointed out. But not necessary for SL, and probably not at all appealing for most people here.

So, in spite of the fact that democratically-elected solutions have worked somewhat well for 2750 years (and I think Gwyneth is being kind here ) I also think the N-burg experience may demonstrate my point.

I do admire the N-burg initiative, however. I hope it continues.

edited to add a few thoughts

while nburg seems to have solved its problem to some extent, to me it seems that nburg made the problem to solve in the first place.

this is not to say that's a wrong thing to do, because some things involving people are like that. but i don't know that nburg proves anything in a general way because of having created the thing it was trying to solve.

however, this seems interesting as there are several groups in sl that try cooperative long term projects.


this seems to imply:
1) that there is a need for projects to get new people up to speed. which i can agree with.
2) there is a need to make new people conform to past decisions. which i agree with conditionally, that being that past decisions can be rescinded. reinventing the wheel is kinda pointless, but hampering a better wheel may be problematic.

there is also the trade of liberty for community. i think hobbe's choice as you present it is limited. brutishness isn't merely violent, but it can be without the benefits of community - acceptable behavior to stay in society, communal resources, group action/projects, group organization, and economies of scale. there are others.

this may be true. i don't think it's proven. i think there are a few places where group organization provides advantage.

as a skeptic, i'm not one wont to believe in promises, but as a pragmatist, i think letting people try is worthwhile, as long as the reasons seem compelling.

i think resident anarchism beneath the benign oligarchy of the lindens gets 80% of the way there.

thinking and thinking outside the box.

i think you get this reading when out of context, but the context is that nburg is also a project that has a membership in flux. the government seems to help coordinate the members towards the group goal.

Hmm, I think I was not clear enough in some of my sentences. I guess I should rewrite them...

1. "SL Government" is not a "solution" finding a "problem". The problem exists. How can you manage medium- to long-term (say, over 6 months...) projects with a group of people (say, over 5), keeping them motivated and productive, even if there is no "finantial" motivation? (as in non-profit groups).

Think of all projects you know that have been around for over 6 months, have a "core" bigger than 5 people, and aren't targeted for immediate or direct profit. How many are there? Well, I know about three (and I'm an active member of two!).

Mostly SL is about individuals (or tiny teams of 1-3 people) doing long-term projects, either for profit or non-profit. Or, for a particular objective - a nice build, a game, whatever - you're able to grasp people's short-term attention (say, a few weeks to a few months). If you're going the whole way to make a very profitable business last a long time - people go the "corporate" way. That's the way some real estate cartels work (and have worked for over 6 months).

*This* is the problem that "government" addresses: keeping a group working together for a long time, even when people leave and join it at will.

2. New members are not the problem! I apologise if my choice of wording made that impression. Not at all! The problem is a high rotativity on a group doing a long-term project - old people leaving, new people joining. How do you keep them all happy? History tells us that democratically elected groups work pretty well in these situations. On the other hand, if you're totally profit-commited, hierarchical military-style organisations - like the "corporate" way - can be much more efficient, as long as everyone reaps the appropriate benefit.

3. Don't think "Neualtenburg", "SL", "Government". Think "Apache", "Internet", "The Apache Foundation" (or any kind of open source organisation/foundation/association which runs/mantains a large, long-termed open source project). Nobody contributing code to the Apache webserver thinks of the Apache Foundation as a "government", but only as a superstructure, a collective of individual programmers, who volunteer their time and work to manage a project - and that are elected by their peers to serve at the management team. In SL, we call these superstructure "a government" - but that's mostly a "label". The principles, however, are the same. Things like FSF, the Apache Foundation, Mozilla, OpenGL, W3, well, you name it, have since long found out the best way to manage these types of projects.

Ok, so they build code. In SL, we build 3D worlds. What's the difference?

Is this "inevitable", then? I'd say, no, it isn't. Several projects IRL work with pure anarchy - and are still viable after many years. Most projects, however, are very similar to what happens in SL. Tiny groups are able to pull off a volunteer-based project for a long time. If you let the group grow, you need organisation. An association/foundation/whatever (it can be even a "virtual organisation" - like USENET, for instance) gives the project the necessary superstructure do deal with this.

I hope that this time I was a bit more clear with my ideas

Your ideas and explanations were clear the first time around, Gwyneth. But thank you for the amplification.

I think my point still stands. N-burg and other experiments are based on RL paradigms that may have less use in SL. One can use "old saws" about not reinventing the wheel, but that is precisely what we're trying to do here in SL, isn't it? At least that's what we're told and what we like to think we're doing.

So the question is fundamentally philosophical and behavioral, and that's an area (self-criticism and challenging fundamental assumptions) that's often difficult to think about, and difficult to sell.

Hi Seth. I'm not sure about Hobbes but I'd have to disagree in regards to problem-solving. Putting aside the strong project-development argument that Gwyneth and Ulrika have made, sim-based or local governments in SL could potentially solve what many consider to be the problem in SL - griefing. So local government is potentially Second Life's 'Holy Grail'. That's why you get so many Monty Python references in the Polisci forum.

There are already governments in SL and they are already solving the problems that you're not certain exist yet. The Furry sim, the Forest, for example has a chain of command, rules of conduct, build-requirements, resident-feedback-mechanisms etc. It's not just a themed-build. There is a clearly a governance system in place and I'm sure the owner would be happy to discuss the problems that it has solved.

-- Neal

maybe for now thinking about it is enough... we've made it this far without doing anything.

I'm sorry I'm late to the conversation. I've been watching this thread from afar with never quite enough time to make a decent post. (We attended a birthday party last night and I'm making preparations for a bridal shower that I'm hosting for a coworker early next week.)

These are among the finest paragraphs I've had the pleasure to read anywhere in the SL forums.

I agree with everything that follows with the exception of the concluding sentence. I'll just touch on that quickly and then move on to your next post.

This final sentence is a common fallacy that often appears when existing technology is applied to a novel environment -- if the environment is novel, then the solution must be novel as well and any attempt to apply an existing solution must be inherently false.

In fact the application of existing solutions to novel problems is a critical first step in an iterative process that will arrive upon a specialized successful future solution. This iterative process is, of course, the scientific method. As Gwyn has mentioned, one can already see evidence of this process working in our experiment.

This means that obviously there is a better system but, aside from allusions to future virtual governmental paradigms which differ from their older RL counterparts, no one in the forums will be able to describe exactly what that is. The reason is, that this better future system must be reached iteratively.

However, it is my belief that this future system will not be very far from where we are now in RL. The similarities between the real and virtual world due to the human need to create analogies guarantees a basic similarity in governance as well.

~Ulrika~