Residential Government

Oh you noticed that too? I was being sarcastic...in a counterpointy way.

You are being funny here right?
Being in the merchant processing industry I am finding more and more requests from Venezuelan merchants for merchant accounts. Unfortunately for them the US based company I work for is not licensed to underwrite (nor would do so) processing funds to or from Venezuela. After much investigation into why these requests are being made, we have found due to the instability of their economic situation (far from being happy) there are quite a few attempts to get money into their economy somehow. The happy ones are the oil companies in Venezuela that reap unheard of dividends.

I live next to Mexico BTW (Brownsville Texas USA) visit it all the time, and they are happy there...VERY poor, but happy.

You are being funny here right?
Being in the merchant processing industry I am finding more and more requests from Venezuelan merchants for merchant accounts. Unfortunately for them the US based company I work for is not licensed to underwrite (nor would do so) processing funds to or from Venezuela. After much investigation into why these requests are being made, we have found due to the instability of their economic situation (far from being happy) there are quite a few attempts to get money into their economy somehow. The happy ones are the oil companies in Venezuela that reap unheard of dividends.

I live next to Mexico BTW (Brownsville Texas USA) visit it all the time, and they are happy there...VERY poor, but happy.

Oh, say, can you see,
In the morning WindLight
What so fiercely we railled
At the last pixel's seeming?

Whose casinos and bars
Through the short SL night
Thru the banlines we watched
Were so laggily streaming?

And the griefers were there
While porn flew thru the air
And bots were a blight
And the campers on chair?

Oh say do my neighbor's
Tower'd ad farms yet spin,
O'er the land of tier fee
And the home of the prim?

(With apologies to Francis Scott Key)

Thats good stuff!

Hotels call their customers guests but they aren't really guests. Same thing.
It not a democracy or a dictatorship. It's a business.

Hmm, LL at the moment are discussing with residents issues such as zoned mainland and governance. It's just discussion, no decisions are in the pipeline but the issues of majority rules etc. have been raised. I fiercely oppose the idea of majority rules and governance being implemented on existing mainland but it wouldn't surprise me to see zoned mainland sims with rules regarding ad farms and such like appearing in the not so distant future and I think they will raise quite a price at auction too.

A true democracy (as opposed to a representative democracy) might well work, in a virtual world. Not only that it might actually be feasible too.

No government in RL is a true democracy, of course. If it were, we would have a referendum on every single issue, and not have elected representatives making decisions for us.

Still, I don't see LL turning it over to a true democracy either.

Unfortunately, banning ad farms simply won't work as intended. Their point is not the ads. Their point is to be so grossly ugly the neighbors buy them out to be rid of them. Who said it has to be an ad to be ugly? It can be "Art!"

Think for a moment how ugly something can be made if it doesn't have to have an ad. Better yet, go visit a gallery of "modern art" and you will see what I mean.

An online world would indeed enable everyone to vote on any issue. This isn't feasible in RL.
It's just as well. It would be terrifying - Mob rule, with the checks and balances being few or none.

Everybody wouldn't vote though. What percentage of 'residents' read the Blog? What percentage read the forums?

We'd have an *elected* clique - some of them put in power by their own alts!


LL might turn the thing over to a "true democracy" if the "true democracy" paid the market valuation? in hard currency?

Government in SL, will never happen.. too many reasons why it wont happen to list. However, there could and SHOULD be a SL resident council. LL looks down on SL as a God would look down on his creation, sometimes what this "god" thinks is best for SL, may not be in actuality what is best for the general resident population.

EX. Landbots, LL didnt lose money either way since the land tier was being paid, so its not any concern to them, however from a residents point of view.
1. It killed the most successful competitive market in SL.
2 How many thousands of residents have been burned by thier own noobieness and landbot runners capitalized on that error.
3 landbots do nothing to enchance SL, rather they take up much of the resources that is intended for the resident population in general.

At this point there is no group expressing resdients wishes, and LL fails to hear any individuals complaint about things. Not only does there need to be a group representing the best interest of the resident, but it needs to be heard by LL.

LL has many times said they hope that residents will form the basis for a community, to me that sounds like they expect us to forum these bodies, problem is, LL doesnt care to recognize any of these. Futhermore, thier actions directly effect the SL economy, our economy.

*as a extra note, if anyone is thinking about forming "government" and placing themselves as the head, don't waste your time. And please dont waste mine!

I'll cast my vote for Prokofy Neva, atleast Prokofy knows how to piss LL off

A few months back I was thinking about how you could make some sort of resident government work in Second Life. Such a government would be--by its nature--subject to the powers of Linden Lab. In other words, it would have powers on in clearly delinated areas that LL delegates to it--something between a contstitutional monarchy and a student council. LL has a legal responsiblity to its owners not to allow any sort of resident government to have enough power to do the kind of things that would have a negative effect on its value. So what a resident government could or could not do would have to be set out in detail by LL in a Constitution or Charter for the government.

However, within that sort of framework, you could have an effective and useful resident government. There is simply a lot of stuff LL does that a resident government might do better. Things like policing, building roads, cleaning up junk prims, volunteer management, etc. There are also things that LL does not do due to manpower constraints, such as resident-to-resident Contract enforcement and dispute adjudication that a resident government could have a real role in (subject to such a role being written into the ToS for Second Life). Finally, LL is interested in community imput on and reaction to various LL plans and proposals. But the community they talk to is often a non-representative self-selected group of people. A resident government could provide a legitimate pipeline to the community for such imput. One game company even reserved a place for a player-elected representative on their Board of Directors.

The trouble is that even if you have things for a resident government to do, how to you see that it does those things in a fair and just manner. How do you select such a government? Such a government could easily become cliquish and self-serving and self-propagating. A FIC writ large, so to speak. I'm not entirely convinced that a resident government could be made better than the current random mix of LL activism and inattention.

Such a government would need to be:

1) Democratically elected,
2) Transparent in operation,
3) Accountable, and subject to the rule of law.

As a look at world politics will show you, these are not trivial requirements.

Democratic elections could be difficult in SL. In the real world, the standard is one man; one vote. But in SL, it could be one man; twenty alts. I can see several ways of dealing with this. First would be a residency requirement of some number of months. The trouble with a residency requirement is that many people would be happy to hold on to a few hundred alts that only show up to vote several months later. Another approach would be to limit the franchise to Premium account holders. That would eliminate the problem of alts voting, but at the (in my view) unacceptable cost of limiting the franchise to about 10% of the active population. The best way of handling the problem requires LL's involvement. They would have to pry open their black box and limit voting to one vote per account. People interested in voting could "register" a designated voting avatar for their account.

The scripts used to run any such election should be open source, full perms, and continually open to inspection. To circumvent the possible problem of banning voters from polling places, voting would need to be either done via the web, or more securely, on Linden Land in-world. Finally, any attempt to grief the polling places should be met with instant IP bans.

Transparency is another hard one. Public meeting requirements are a no-brainer, but in any human political system backroom deals and private discussions are inevitable. To say nothing of the potential for out and out bribery as funds could easily change hands through a trail of alt accounts or even real world paypal accounts. I'm not sure I have any good solutions to this problem--just like real life governments seem not to.

Accountability could be enforced by regular elections (I suggest every six to nine months), discrete constituencies for the elected representatives (perhaps a group of sims, or a group of groups, or even a group of last names), some sort of independent judiciary, and ultimately, Linden review (which could function as a Supreme Court). Such a Linden panel could also be tasked with intervening should the resident government exceed its authority.

Honestly, the whole thing is messy. I'm not sure that any sort of resident government would be worth the trouble. And the paradox of democracy is that the people who most want the power are often the people who can be least trusted. And the people you do want with the power are too busy doing other, more productive, things.

Heaven protect me from a "resident council"!!!!!!

No thanks - that just petty government under another name.

One the most prominent ad farmers around at the moment doesn't even seem to carry ads at all, just smiley face on spinning yellow and black prims. Only allowing 512M plots to be sold has been suggested, but isn't that generally how they get plots anyway, before cutting them?

Put me down as a nyet for any type of resident governmnet on a wholesale basis, just as I am hopeful I won't live to see a One World gGvernment in RL. If a group of sim owners/residents wish to confederate together and govern themselves, that's fine, but only the providers should be responsible for the general governance of the place. There should be some sort of method for the residents to communicate with them, offer feedback, and suggestions, but I don't want busybodies telling me what I can and can't do.

As far as tier and premium fees go, it's a service we are being offered, somehow it has to be paid. I see tier/rent as a property/slash utility tax. No one likes being taxed, but the money has to come from somewhere.

A very very good point. One of the best things about RL governments is that there are many of them. If you can't stand the one you find yourself in, you can leave and try a different flavor.

An SL-wide government would not have this important safety valve. (The current arrangement of private estates, by the way, DOES provide this sort of freedom. If you don't like your current government...estate owner and covenant, that is...go elsewhere).

If there was a government grid wide I imagine I'd have to join the rebel alliance ..... Hmm this might work if we can get someone to volunteer to wear the Princess Leia bikini!

Besides that, despite the trend to homogenize us into a beige sorta society, i enjoy the fact that there are cultural differences. And a lot of our governments reflect our cultural and religious diversity, good and bad. Our laws and customs should reflect that.

Actually not, you have a student concil, is that government by a different name? Tribal coucil? that would be a form of micro government. What ever word you would want to call it, the function would NOT be to pass laws that resident have to abide to cause the "coucil" says so, they would be a group look out for the best interest of the population in general.

Like determining if LL should release more land to bring the land prices down, or how much L$ supply Linden should pump into the economy. Things directly related to our economy that LL doesn't have to worry about because they are in the "god" position. Personally Im against Supply Lindens function 100% if you have a economy it shouldnt artificially manipulated, which is the primary function of Supply Linden

I agree, a colorful society will always be better than a "everybodies gray" world, but when religion is thrown in there, it makes me shiver. I certainly hope that religion can be stomped out of SL. Given the present state of the real world, and the fact that most things that are wrong with it are not a factor of lack of religion, but a factor of too many religious fanatics. I like that SL is relatively free from those kind of problems, and free mostly from racism, free from slavery, well except where its consensual. Free to be what you want, Government and religion both try to control that freedom

As long as there are alts with anonymity, there is no transparency possible.

No, they are not dictators. More like the Laws of Physics.

Yeah, that would be cool. And I wanna be a Jedi knight!

True--and in order to fix that, you would have to require people serving on such a resident government to give up a level of their privacy (such as RL names, names of alts, etc.). Which would further lead to a resident government becoming the preserve of people who want to too badly to be trusted with it.

Me too! I'm not wearing the Princess Leia bikini, but I have a picture of someone we all know and love wearing one...

I don't see how a government would be effective without complete LL backing and that isn't going to happen, thankfully. Put me in the camp of those that are governed quite enough in RL. Yes, not having a government has some drawbacks, but I can live with those. I don't need most of the benefits that a government provides such as protection, infrastructure and social services. It would be nice if we had liasons that LL would listen to, but I'd like to be able to approach LL myself and let them know what I think or need even more. Other than that, I really don't need help with my SL from a government.

(to quote myself)

Just like the current US presidential election