Aimee's important post about SL player-run democracies

Could you give an example of one of the 'ridiculous things' that Concerned Residents is promoting, please?

Invect,

That, indeed, was the situation when I first joined Second Life. I had to speak with an accent and talk about my folks in Texas. It was about six months before Second Life was opened to people from other than America and Canada.

There is always an 'other side'. It is something that is essential for some strange reason. Has there ever been a time when there hasn't been an 'enemy'? Before the Middle East it was the Soviet Union. Before that, in my country, it was the Germans.

If we don't have a natural enemy we find one, or make one, as has been the case recently.

Here it is a year later and the horse is nothing more but a brittle skin stretched over a drying skeleton and some people just will NOT let it go.

The overwhelming majority of people in SL do not want a player-run government.

-Ghoti

I like alot of things that Gwyneth says in her post, the above in particular.

-Ghoti

I am a staunch no resident government in SL person. Personally I am happy with LL being our government and don't want that to change.

At one time I said if such a thing came about, I would leave SL but now I think I would simply ignore it and its laws and go on as per usual. I suppose we could create government free sims as we now have for groups like N'berg for example.

Alexa

Thank you, SuezanneC. Very instructive.

Invect's post about Americans was a diatribe.

Except that Gwyneth is only listing things that can be dealt with on a local scale, and ignoring grid-wide issues. For instance, a Neualtenberg-only Chamber of Commerce would be next to useless.

Except in Neualtenberg. Where-as other discussions in this thread are saying we need some sort of player-run body to direct and oversee the actions of all residents. I disagree whole-heartedly with the concept that some player or group of players should be given discretion to make or enforce rules over all other residents.

-Ghoti

Neualtenberg is too small to need one, so it would be useless there as well. Keep in mind that even a small country like Haiti has a population of more than 8,000,000 people. With SL's population of registered avatars at around 60,000, we're not a world, country, or province. We're a city. Given that scale, Neualtenberg is what, 4 city blocks?

While it can be argued that SL doesn't need a Chamber of Commerce, or Department of Public Works, or Endowment for the Arts, I don't find the argument that these kinds of things can be effective at the Neualtenberg level persuasive.

This thread is speculating about how a "player-run body" can enact the will of "all other residents."

Yeah, the size of a city block, maybe. I do not know how many individuals make up the active Neualtenberg group but in the scope of things, that sounds about right.



I guess my point is that Neualtenberg should feel free to enact any sort of body they wish so long as that body only holds sway over the actions of people who have submitted themselves to the jurisdiction of Neualtenberg's rules. I am not speaking to the effectiveness of this approach in any given situation.

What if we were instead talking about Ansheland, and some hypothetical player-based government that might come to life there. Ansheland is alot larger than Neualtenberg.... maybe more like the size of a villiage. Could they make these systems work effectively for their population?



And I am saying that such a 'player-run body' in no way, shape, or form can enact the will of a sovereign individual that does not choose to be subjected to the will of other residents.

So long as it is not instituted and codified by LL, there can be no such body that has the right to enact the will of a perceived group of 'all residents' over the will of the individual.

-Ghoti

Hard to say...I'm not sure how big Ansheland is these days, but let's say for argument's sake that they could. Would the services still be as effective on a small scale as they would be grid-wide? Does a Chamber of Commerce, limited to a planned community, protect SL newbies from dishonest merchants or land fraud? Does it offer a comprehensive list of builders available for contracts to create SL structures for RL companies? Does it compile and keep up-to-date a thorough list of SL businesspeople willing and able to speak to RL media outlets about their experiences?

But what if LL did codify some kind of player-run government? What if it provided services that freed up the Lindens to concentrate on bigger and better things? For instance, a grid-wide Department of Public Works could take over the job of maintaining Linden land, realigning roads, cleaning up stray prims, etc., saving the Lindens from having to sort through land maintenance requests and from actually having to go to the location and fix whatever problem is there. Would a governing body that performed these kinds of in-world services be attractive to Linden Lab? Enough so that they might grant it some "powers?"

Within the context of Ansheland's community, I think such a thing could work.



27.74% of people that answered this poll claim they would leave SL (I am among that number)



I think most of this could work on a 'service bureau' basis, much as the Greeters and Mentor Programs work. People volunteer to do these tasks with Linden oversight. None of those tasks that I see above make me think they would require 'power over' another player. I think the 'SL Resident Road Crew' with powers to remove/modify prims on LL land, under LL supervision, is a good idea.



I think a governing body would not be needed to impliment this. Even things such as a Better Business Bureau, IMO, would be useful, so long as they had Linden oversight and it was LL doing the enforcing after proper examination of the facts, not some arbitrary collection of residents.

-Ghoti

Believe me, it's abundently clear that some people who read these forums are unhappy with the idea of a player-run government in the abstract. I think however that more people complain about being sold swampland disguised under foliage, or that they were suckered into selling their first land for way under market price to a land baron, or that products they bought don't match the picture on the package, or that a public teaching area is full of prims and a scheduled class cannot be held there, or that Burning Life has been ignored by the Lindens, or that a particular group received a no-bid contract to construct a public building, or that the Lindens keep pushing the same avatar names to the RL media outlets, or that the current land auctions unfairly favor land barons, etc...

If the Public Works were limited to being a road crew, I might agree (though I'm not sure how many people would volunteer to be on-call janitors). The DoPW would have responsibilities far beyond simple cleanup duties, including making important decisions about public builds (see my earlier posts). I mention the road crew because it illustrated my contention that a government could be of benefit to the Lindens, one reason they might be persuaded to cede some of their powers.

Also, keep in mind that there is not an endless supply of volunteers to draw from.

I seem to remember a couple of times on these forums people announcing that they were forming "Better Business" type organizations, but nothing has ever come of it. It's very difficult to implement a needed but daunting project like this without an existing infrastructure to build upon.

(Why would the collection of residents be arbitrary? Are you envisioning an election process in which we pull names from a hat?)

Some wise residents once posted that you cannot have a world-wide organisation defining, establishing, and enforcing policies, if you don't have world-wide enforcement of laws. But to have world-wide laws, you need a world-wide government (whatever its form; it does not mean a democratic government!).

It's rather pointless to discuss having one thing and not the other.

So, the best you can have is one of the two following things:

1. Local-level governments, local-level bodies of laws, local-level enforcement, local-level policies;
   
2. World-wide volunteer-based organisations establishing "guidelines" without any sort of enforcing power.
   

A mixed model is one where local-level governments (as said, one person running a group of 50 sims is a one-person "government"!) voluntarily submit themselves to the "guidelines" of a world-wide organisation, and enforce them locally as laws. Some RL examples: NAFTA, United Nations, OECD, WTO, European Union; perhaps NATO as well. All these examples are cases where you have a world-wide (or continent-wide...) organisation which establishes guidelines that sovereign states voluntarily subscribe to, agreeing to set them up as laws in their own countries. As usual, the Wikipedia provides a good discussion base on the notion of "international law". You'll see that the key issue is "who voluntarily adheres to the guidelines" and "who enforces the laws".

Second Life always sounded weird to me, in the sense that so often people wish to embrace world-wide bodies of "guideline enforcing" at the same time despising the issue of a world-wide government. There is simply no record in History of anything like that. I fail to understand how something could be done in SL — unless, of course, one simply dismisses the "need for laws" by drawing "power" from Linden Lab directly.

As so many pointed out, LL acts much closer to a "theocracy" (and not even a bening dictatorship). In a sense, they only interfere when there is resident disruption of the public peace. They nudge here and there a project that they find interesting to their own purposes, and they definitely control the economy overall (since they're the only "public mint" for L$), but there is no direct control and overseeing over residents' affairs.

I still stick to my own mantra If you wish for "guideline-establishing bodies", and wish for them to have "enforcing power", go to a self-governed community.