Alts becoming government officials

I have to agree with Kendra on this issue.



No, I'm not. But privacy trumps all.

why should I be afraid of the Sim owner?

Then don't become a government official. That solves that problem.

That's what I'm wondering. Why not let the sim owner have your number?

For the same reasons I don't want the US Government to plant a RFID chip in my forehead.

In theory, I'd keep as much of the stuff in world as possible. Actually the forums, teamspeak and backend databases sort of take away from the immersive experience. Six votes to a seat would in theory work better for me than RL ID. Of course we don't have the population to support that. Many people want to keep their SL completly separate from RL. OTOH some recent theorists/economists don't make the distinction between RL and VW life.

Six accounts per household seems like a mechanism by which LL customers can exert influence in SL by paying USD...much like buying Lindens on the LindeX.

I would say there are plenty of people who would be happy to provide their number to become an official. In fact, if it turns out some of the current officers want to step down to avoid this, I'd bet their seats would fill up rather quickly with people who will provide their home number.

ZOMG!!! U R TEH FASCIZT!!!!!!!!!!!!

seriously --this is the single most repulsive post I have ever read in a Neualtenburg Forum.

Why does it bother you so much. I don't understand. Would you explain your fears in this matter?

No, that won't do at all; you are then precluding government participation from those individuals who want to keep their RL information private.

The point is. I don't have to.

Not at all. No one is proposing anyone make private lives public. My suggestion is to provide a phone number to a single trusted person, who will vow to never reveal that info or any info gathered other than whether there are alts.

Right, no one would have to, they could choose to serve or not. Under that proposal that is.

In my view, giving anyone that information is making it public. And I'm not disparaging Sudane, just a general principle re privacy.

This is the same mentality that suggests that it's okay for George Bush to tap my phone because if I weren't doing anything wrong, I've nothing to hide.

Any time you provide services, whether volunteer work or paid, it's normal to fill out a small form, providing your home phone and other info.

No one is abusing that info.

It's my contention anyone who is really committed to a project will provide personal information to a secure person within the system. I volunteered to help clean up the bay front. To go out and pick up trash I was required to fill out a simple form with my hme info. The project was important enough to me to be willing to provide this personal information to a person I never met before.

Kevn, for the last time I'm NOT having phone-sex with you!!!!!!

GAWD!

Kinda reminds me of the old BBS days when a Sysop would call me for account verification. That's not an endorsement, mind you...just saying it's not new or unheard of. I do think privacy is paramount. Theoretically (and according to the Lindens), you treat alts as separate in world persons. I like to keep the RL and SL as separate as possible. It shouldn't really matter to me if all of SL is truly 8 players and their alts. Whoever pulls the strings in RL doesn't really matter. By the same token, if we had a fully scripted avatar bot, that shouldn't matter either. If the bot passed the Turning test, we wouldn't know it was a bot.

It is one of those rules of the road when structuring a gov't though. The fact that anyone can be a fraternal sextuplet controlled by a single brain does not occur in RL. Also the fact that I can't know if they are a sextuplet without self-disclosure. So the structure might not mimic a RL gov't structure.

While I commend the flexibility of not requiring SL to mimic a RL structure, there's an underlying principle here that should be retained. If you're talking about a democratic vote with the power to shape the laws under which a community in SL is governed then the principle of one person/one vote is crucial.

Just because an individual uses an alt to get himself two votes doesn't make that person twice as likely to be right compared to the person who only exercises one vote. And having a voting alt does not make an individual somehow more deserving of the additional decisionmaking say. It could be argued that any instance of one individual/multiple votes is detrimental to the democratic process because that person's votes are dampening the diversity of opinion that would otherwise characterize the group of individual voters. Taken to the extreme one individual with a huge number of votes at his disposal effectively crowds out the opinions of the others. I feel that diversity of opinion is crucial in the voting population, otherwise it resembles a monoculture, which is not particularly viable.

In principle one person/one vote should translate into one individual decisionmaker/one vote in SL. The problem of verification is difficult, but not insurmountable. I'd try a system that assumed people were doing the decent thing, but allowed a citizen to challenge a pair of avatars to undergo an informal test. Perhaps a small number of randomly selected citizens could present the two avatars with a few questions made up on the spot, and require the two avatars to respond concurrently. Each questioner would deliberate privately for a few minutes, then privately submit a yes/no decision as to whether the challenged avatars seemed to be two alts of one individual.

It's probably obvious that I'm thinking in terms of a low level process, not one resembling a big splashy hearing before supreme court justices.

ROFL! That set me up for the day! Thank you, Kendra.

I thik that would be an agreeab;e solution.

What happens if one of the suspected pair is a slow typer, or is afk without showing the sign - someone comes to the door, for instance - or doesn't understand the question, or takes time to think about it, or refuses to respond to such obvious bullying?

I am a sole citizen btw - no alts here and no intention of having any.

Presumably we would all be used to whether or not an player was a slow typer, or frequently afk --For example --Claude could easily be mistaken for an alt if we didn't know his usual patterns --but we know Claude, and so we would know how to judge.

Similarly any avatar showing up other than me that frequently skips words and uses em dashes too frequently is --most probably me.

Other than what I mentioned above...Democracy is founded on one person one vote. If you fully separate RL from SL you must be prepared to deal with one avatar one vote. Effectively, the alt holder is buying up to 6x influence from LL.

If you have two roles that for philosophical reasons cannot be held by the same RL person, those roles must be held by a Premium account holder with verified mainland holdings. I'm just trying to be pragmatic within the SL "laws of physics".

If these things aren't accounted for, they will eventually be abused in a larger gov't structure. We have a similar problem with the Sim owner. I argued for a full Sim value escrow to deter the sim owner from selling (which is only illegal under the law of the sim gov't, not LL or RL).

There is one solution I proposed a few times, initially while writing the constitution, and later after our first conflict over potential alts. A partial solution is to scale votes depending on the amount of land one owns. Thus, a single individual with a large lot would have as much voting power as three alts owned by one person with three small lots.

I actually went so far as to build this method of tabulation into the voting system as an optional feature and it works quite well. In fact for every election it returned the same results. I just thought I'd toss this out there.

It doesn't do anything for excluding specific RL people from participating in the sim, though.

~Ulrika~