Alts becoming government officials

That's very interesting and has much merit. The only drawback I see is that large landholders have more political clout than small landowners. This fully matches Frank Lardner's theory of the "corporation", but it's a bit of a plutocracy isn't it? Assuming there are no alts and Joe has twice as much land as Frank, Joe gets 2 votes to Frank's 1.

That works, but it's not democracy as I understand it. Correct me if I misunderstand the model. Thanks!

It is not democracy, however neither is a system that allows individuals to have multiple voting alts. The difference one requires verification and trust and the other just builds alts into the system. Interesting dilemma isn't it?

~Ulrika~

If you have a 1 avatar = 1 vote system you have up to 6 levels of influence per RL person. Maximum influence of a single RL person is 6x. There is an upper limit to the amount of influence you can buy.

In your proposal, a single sim gov't with the minimum holding (1 vote equivlent) being 16m2, in theory the large landholder can buy 4095 votes.

So with my proposal you can buy 6 votes from LL. From yours you can buy 4,095 votes from the sim owner. The advantage to your system of course is that the voter has invested not in LL but the gov't itself. It turns into a shareholder's meeting though. At that point it's a corporation, not a democratic government.

In an interesting variant to that, you can set the minimum vote holding to be a fraction of $8 USD worth of sim land, with a maximum of 6 such votes regardless of holdings. This way it's better to buy influence by investing in the city. The downside is that you can do both and buy effectively 36x influence.

Alternatively all citizens must be premium account holders. One vote, one avatar. Verify mainland holding on voter registration. Then we get Roman citizens and freepersons (2nd class non-voting citizens). Yuck.
It's a mindbender...

Perhaps the meetings could be held on skype or another voice program.

That way the members would get to know the sound of each voice. Also if meetings were held at the same time it would be harder to be in two places at the same time.

It's still anonymous, no worries others will know who you are.

Some of us might be deaf.

That's true and I had suggested it before. Others may not have sufficient bandwidth or CPU to run Teamspeak client and SL. In any case, the conversation could be recorded and transcribed, but someone with very quick typing skills would have to type out the words in real time for those who couldn't listen in...

I don't think any of it is a real showstopper. People use voice in RL gov't meetings (with sessions recorded and ASL for the deaf). Maybe some kind of Dragon Naturally Speaking or other voice recognition could chat the voice conversation in real time.

huh?

I already told you, Kevn --I'm not having PHONE SEX with you!!!!

Gawd!

Deaf people would have a hard time hearing what's said on Skype or any other VOICE program - don'tcha think?

It's not really a purchase of a vote, rather it is a weight that scales linearly with the amount of land one owns. The benefit is that there are no invasive verification methods required and an incentive to own more land is created.

With the one-person-one-vote method of N'burg there is no incentive to purchase land in regards to increasing one's power, rather there is an incentive to illegally create alts. This could lead to privacy-invading attempts to verify identity. What's especially bad about alt creation in a system like N'burg's, is that they can be used to spawn additional factions, each which, due to the way the Sainte-Laguë method works, are essentially guaranteed a seat on the RA.

So, it's a toss up. One system takes into account the imperfections in the SL system and the other attempts to work around them. In either case the democracy provided is suboptimal, which to me is not a problem as democracy (mob rule) is of marginal worth anyway. It should exist just enough to prevent individuals from feeling disenfranchised yet not so much that the minority is victimized.


Finally, a hybrid method I've been tossing about is one which compiles votes both ways. It creates a vote tally based on both straight count and one weighted by land. If a referendum passes both votes, it passes. If not, it does not pass. For future governmental works, I want to try and address the unique environment SL provides (alts, sim managers, groups) directly as opposed to creating an abstract government and then patching it to meet SL's unique requirements.

~Ulrika~

Perhaps that would be a prerequisite. In many positions hearing is a requirement.

What about blind people, how are we accommodating them?

What about people without fingers to type?

We could play this all night.

The question is, is there a deaf person or are we looking to kill a possible answer that might solve the issue of alts in government?

If there isn't now, there might be one later. You never know, you might lose your hearing in a freak forums accident

Well, then it would be time to resign my position

Is that the Christian viewpoint, Kevn?

Yes, it is. Just as blind people can't do certain jobs because of their situation, so also deaf people are limited in what they can do.

Since there are no deaf people at issue and never has been as far as I know, this is all speculation from fear.

I think these are excuses. Are you afraid others will hear your voice? Do you have something to hide? Maybe a different gender? I can only imagine why some people are so worried about this. It must be something.

I'm not sure what the advantage is of this over the "one m², one vote" system -- I thought we had established that it's possible for one RL person to have several SL premium accounts, each of which could hold land. So your suggestion is still open to "open RL person, several votes".

Just while we're on the topic, there's no requirement to speak. You can listen without speaking, so you don't need a microphone. You can chat type. Also a transcriptionist could type the conversation while it's happening.

So I think of it as an "add-on" without taking anything away from the existing process. I think the only problems are:

1)Find a 3rd party TS server so no one has access to the IP addresses of participants.
2)Make sure the voice session is "tied" to the avatar by password. I think there's an SL vendor who does this.
3)Make sure that a transcriptionist is around who can type as fast as most speak. If multiple people speak at once, well it'll have to be sorted out with the written transcript.
4)You could destroy the spoken recording after the transcript is completed.
5)A deaf person could use a voice recognition program to help decipher a quick conversation
that the transcriptionist couldn't keep up with.

-I expect VOIP eventually will be part of the SL client.

1. I don't think Skype allows users to track ip addresses, so that's not an issue.
2. If the av logs into the skype session with their N'burg registered email address, verification of av to voice will be pretty reliable.
3. I would think a recorded session would be ideal. Anyone interested could listen to the discussion and still allow the participants to remain anonymous.
4. I think the recorded voices would enhance the records.
5. Deaf people could use such software to listen to the record, but the idea is to require the officers to speak, so they are voice recognized.

Just my opinion.

Alts are not allowed in the city presently.

I didn't quite see it stated that way on the official SL website. If true I agree:

A) Forget about account type. 1 Avatar = 1 Vote. You can buy 6x influence from LL.
B) 1m2 = 1 Vote. You can "invest" to obtain 65,535x influence from the Sim owner.

The problem with a hybrid approach is that you can buy AxB influence. Ulrika's last proposal is interesting where you must pass both an A and a B type vote for a referendum, for example. This way both the mob and the feudal landed gentry must approve.

Advantage A)You can only buy 6x influence from LL.
Disadvantage A)You are buying it from LL not the sim owner

Advantage B)You are buying from the sim owner and investing in the "city"
Disadvantage B)You can buy 65,535 / (m2 per vote) times the influence.

What I don't like about B) is that if I buy 51% of the sim from the sim owner, I will win all votes (de facto dictator). If there are 50 citizens in a sim, then with A) a single RL person could hold a maximum of 12% total influence. In our present situation with 30 citizens a RL person could hold 20% influence.

I don't like the idea of the poor not getting a vote and I don't like the idea of the rich landowners running the show. I think A is more democratic and the lesser of two evils. I think true VW democracy is one avatar one vote.

BTW this should be moved to the Political Science Forum, because we're not proposing anything here for Neualtenburg.

I thought this was only about N'burg.

I'd agree with that. PoliSci is read by a larger fraction of the general forum population, so we'd be casting a wider net for solutions.

We're debating an issue with two essential components: a fundamental principle of democracy and 'how do we make it work?'. It's an important issue. Important enough to me that I was willing to post in the Neualt forums even though the dramafest is still going on.

You made the same mistakes as your previous post. First, it's possible to have more than six alts, although most cheaters won't have more than a few. Second, there would be a minimum and maximum amount of land one must purchase in order to be a citizen, let's say 512 m² minimum and 8,192 m² maximum for a ratio of 16. An individual with a fixed budget would then have to balance the power of more alts with more land. Total influence would not be a product of the two RWC factors.

Another interesting note is that N'burg, being representative and thus controlled by several small oligarchies (one of them outside of the government), is especially sensitive to alt abuse, as it could allow one to enter multiple branches of the government simultaneously. Groups with a small total population (like N'burg) are also sensitive to alt abuse. I guarantee it's going on right now in some form or another.

~Ulrika~

How can you guarantee it?

Stop with your mind-games, Zugzug --we ALL know Kevn is your alt.