NBrg land?

I swear I've read the whole shebang! So if I want to buy N'brg plot, it has no tier impact as far as my dealings with LL, right? How is the monthly payment made? I know I'm stoopid. Please bare with me...seriously...bare with me

Hey Gabe - no worries! Cool that you're considering purchasing Neualtenburg-land.

I own a fair bit myself and am thus familiar with the process of owning land. I can assure you that owning land here will not affect your tier as it pertains to LL. The monthly payment is performed preferably by in-game payment of L$ to our land manager Rudeen Edo and at the same time IM'ing Sudane Erato to notify her that you have paid (Rudeen is Sudanes alt little sister). AFAIK the payment should be made no later than the 21st of a month although the first remainder of a month is free for new buyers of land.

The first step in the process should obviously be to check out the list of available plots on the home page and using the map check out what they look like in SL and if they might be suitable for you. Once you've found one or more suitable plots with or without a city house you should get in touch with Sudane and ask to purchase the land. Payment is performed as in the above.

The rest of this process is how I experienced it although it may have changed with the advent of a notarisation machine in Neualtenburg. Sudane should be able to enlighten you on that:

You will then be sent a notecard containing a draft deed for your new land. You should read this text and if you can approve it then copy it to a new notecard, which you will set to allow others to copy or transfer but not to modify. This notecard you should send back. You will then get a deed key, which you should go to the Rathaus archive and rezz on the shelves as a binder with your name on it next to the others there.

I hope the above proves to be useful to you. As mentioned Sudane should also be available with the exact knowledge of the process as it works today. Good luck on your land surveying. Let us know when you move in!

Hopefully, the home page map is more up-to-date than when I visited a few months ago. At that time, it showed several plots as for sale when they had been already sold. Important to synchronize the home page with the actual land ... one of those admin tasks assumed by Neualt volunteer management.

Well Frank I think you'll find that with the current pace of activities in Neualtenburg 'a few months' is actually quite a long time ago. To be honest I did have a somewhat similar experience of the landverzeichnis not being entirely up to date when I used it to find my own land just over a month ago but in the mean time a lot of things have happened.

As I understand it the landverzeichnis on the web page is now being fed by a script done by Flyingroc who grabs Sudane's original copy every time a user requests the page whereas in the past it was only updated at regular intervals.

It is certainly my subjective impression that updates are taking place at a faster pace now - it seems almost that from day to day I see new names appearing on the list but that may be due to either the new script, a more frequent pace of updates or simply that more people want to move in now...

Do you have any views on the question of volunteer management by the way? You've probably posted on this before so I should probably just do a search but I'm too lazy

Most of my considered views on that were in the Law Society's Case Study of Neualtenburg. I'm waiting for the dust to settle in the ongoing re-organization and hoping some of the other 30-40 Law Society members will prepare some evaluations of the New-Neualtenburg.

It bears being mentioned (even more explicitly than this), that Frank was looking at land during probably the only serious period of upheaval in Nburgs history (the departure of Ulrika).

Neualtenburg is atually one of the most reliable and stable place to buy land.

Thanks for the reference! By way of quick skimming I found the following quote in your study, which seems quite interesting in relation to my question. I take the liberty of quoting it here to the benefit of that extremely unlikely circumstance that there might indeed be any other forum users, who are as uninformed and lazy as myself:



This question is most certainly of crucial importance to the persistence of Neualtenburg. I'd venture the guess that the Open Source movement and its dynamics of a gift economy can to a certain extent be analogously applied to the case of Neualtenburg governmental administration. However, some of the residents, who actually do _perform_ administrative tasks might be better equipped to comment on this question than I am..

I look forward to reading your case study in detail sometime over the weekend!

Not in that case study, but a parallel concept is the basis for the success of open source, which some thoughtful analysts attribute to other than a mystical "gift economy."

For more, one might refer to Weber's "The Success of Open Source," (Harvard Univ. Press, 2004) in which he dissects out the economic principles behind the rather well-ordered process of successful open source projects, such as Linux, and presents the idea that the process can be extended to endeavors other than writing software, without relying upon altruism as a motivation. In other words, under the right circumstances, people do open source work for their own benefit, not as a gift to others. Government might be one of those applications, especially when you think about the individual psychic, political and even monetary rewards that can accrue to those portraying themselves as "government servants."

RA members, the Guildmaster and SC members should be paid monthly salary from the treasury. The Guild should have it's own money in addition to managing the city treasury. The LRA, functioning as mayor, should be able to create non-elected civil service jobs by passing a budget containing an admin cost line item. All non-elected civil service jobs will be at will with the LRA functioning as employer. The RA can pay the guild for work, with the GM dividing proceeds any way he/she sees fit. Guild members can be employed by the project manager (GM) on a casual basis.

Then stuff will get done. You betcha... Of course, you need a vibrant merchant class sharing profits with the Guild and RA (treasury) for this to work.

IMO anything is prefereable to the current state of affairs in RL where government officials expect compensation on the same level as VP's of sucessful corporations do.

As long as the environment is like that, the only people who will be attracted to the "job" of government are the same people who are attracted to any corporate position and for much the same reasons.

People are not in government today so much because they want to "do good," or help the community or even help themselves by helping the community (all the traditional reasons for government service), but because the pay is good, the perks are better and the "fame" helpufull on the way up the corporate ladder.

I find the "volunteer" government of Neualtenburg refreshing.

Indeed. A paid government "servant" is essentially a parasite. At best, a mostly-benign symbiote.

Which is not getting paid for actual services rendered; I've mentioned myself that my current contribution (in the form of the wiki) remains mine to do with as I will, at my sufferance, until and unless I'm paid for it. But the actual governance is, essentially, it's own reward - you've got a voice in running things. If you can't manage to do it, subcontract out.

I do not - at the time of writing - have access to the publications of the Harvard management book club - but I'd be surprised if the analysis in that tome was not largely similar to the same author's analysis on pages 20 - 29 in his 2000 Working Paper entitled "The Political Economy of Open Source".

The part of the gift economy concept with which Weber takes issue as applied to open source is the notion that an abundance of resources leads to generosity replacing possessions as the primary indicator of "social status" in the community.

Having said that I've never seen a volunteer political body larger than PTA that functions well as a fully volunteer structure. Surely there are some less rewarding aspects of bureaucracy that won't be fulfilled unless they are paid positions.

You should see the turnover on open source projects. You get bored with one and do something different. They are usually quite unstable politically, Linux is not the norm.

Actually, its not a club ... Harvard University Press is a publishing house owned by the university ... and the book is available from the usual online and offline booksellers (about $30 new in hardcover and $12 in softcover, somewhat cheaper bought used) and in many public and university libraries. Not a clubby thing at all. The book looks closely at what Weber thought were the particular circumstances in which open source projects do succeed. These circumstances are admittedly uncommon.

A quick scan of the working paper published 4 years before the book indicates that it may be a working draft of what later became the book. I do recommend the book itself, as a thought-provoking read and not hard to find.

In my experience, most of those less rewarding aspects can be jobs.

That is, I want to draw a clear difference between the city paying people for performing actual, tangible things - running the website, building a museum, running classes, etc - and the actual "positions of power", i.e., being an RA or SC member, and to a lesser extent, being Guildmaster. Such people are effectively writing their own paychecks; I do not want to see the foolishness of Congress voting to give itself a raise.



People don't live in those open source projects, whereas - in a sense - people do live in Linux, it being the all-encompassing kernal of the computer operating system.

Similarly, there's a divide between specific projects and tasks - and where I fully agree that we shouldn't rely on volunteer work - and the actual running/ruling of the city.

Keep 'em poor, so you know they're really interested.

Thanks Frank .. I did know that already, though .. the university at which I work has a full collection. I just chose to be a bit careless with my words to perhaps express my feeling that HUP are very good at choosing books with a potential for becoming bestsellers through popularisation of a research framework that may have been available for quite a few years already.

This thread is rapidly diverting from it's original subject so perhaps it'd be better to continue the discussion in a seperate thread if necessary. It is an interesting discussion what motivates people to spend extra time contributing to the community and whether economic theories based on the premise of homo economicus do indeed apply to Second Life where perhaps homo ludens is a more appropriate metaphor for understanding what motivates human behaviour I think.

That said, we need to differentiate between tasks that members of government do as a function of their official roles and those that they merely do by convention. For example.....

As LRA, I set meeting times and create and post agendas for meetings, this is inevitably linked to the power of setting said agendas and I have no problem not being paid for it.

I also collect every proposed piece of legislation and get it into notecards so it's available at the meeting, handle distribution of documents at the meetings, post summaries and transcripts to the forums and wiki (respectively) and update the code section of the wiki to reflect everything that passes. These are things that could be done by an RA clerk or city archivist, and thus ought to be compensated tasks, IMO, Sudane's treasurer functions (financial reports/balance sheets/paying the tier bill) are distinct from her Guild role and probably ought to be compensated.

This raises an interesting point that would apply to Aliasi since she's on RA. If members of government are doing other non-governmental functions for the city, can they be compensated for those functions?

I'm also on the SC, just inactive, don't forget. So, when I'm arguing against getting paid, I'm doing it against my own apparent self-interest TWO ways.

Anyway, I do think non-governmental functions should be compensated. The wiki I'm doing as a public service under controlled conditions; I don't object to the idea of getting paid for it, but at the moment I'm paying for that webspace and wasn't using it much, so I don't really care.

My point is the actual policy-making is its own reward. Anything that can be done by the citizenry at large, should be.

As mentioned, there are two classes of public servant: elected and unelected. Both are currently volunteers doing mission critical work for the good of the city. Looking at how RL North American small towns work, you have typically nominally paid elected officials and nominally paid employees.

There are several ideas behind this. Typically Mayors (read LRA) are prominent citizens who have personal financial stability. Mayors are generally paid a lower-middle class salary. The function of this is to keep mayors who are:

1)Not in it just for the money
2)If under financial strain, do not have to abandon the office to make a living wage
3)Have more accountability to the citizenry. I expect more from a mayor who is being paid. I can logically expect nothing from a volunteer I know nothing about. Remember, the average new citizen will not join N'Burg during an election.
4)Yes, these officials can vote for raises to themselves. How politically popular would that be?
Remember the Guild (containing possibly all citizens) can veto that.

Then there are non-elected jobs. Some things just have to get done in order for a city to function. Fire, police, garbage removal, landscaping etc. City employees must be paid or these things don't happen. Granted, in SL you don't need to pay for food etc., but the land cost and SL premium account costs are monthly and ever present...as are ISP costs for the City web site.

Pay allows you to hold an employee accountable and to punish non-performance, it can also be linked to pay for perfomance (advancement).

As a psychology graduate, I found this study interesting in that it went against the I/O theories I had been taught:
http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=5&n=11

I realize this is SL, not RL. What kind of civil service do you see? What aspects of volunteerism/open source and traditional structures would you adopt?

BTW as you know I like the Guild Master as treasury trustee. The Guild also needs it's own money to pay artisans for delivered work.

I love the idea of N'Burg and think the city is wonderful. I don't want it to be known as an empty diorama whose population is in steady decline and whose main export is red tape. I was hearing this from new visitors when I greeted the other night. These were the main criticisms.

I think I agree with you. I'd ask you to clarify what you mean by governmental (presumably uncompensated) and non-governmental (compensated) functions.

Web site maintenance is clearly non-governmental. Creating RA agendas is clearly governmental. Things ike treasurer and keeping RA records are to me more of a grey area.

It's something that should be hashed out. Each branch determines how it will go about things I would think, but in general I would divide it between things that are necessary, to things that, however useful, are not strictly necessary in the sense of maintaining the sim. Maintaining a website is not strictly necessary for Neualtenburg to exist in the simplest sense, whereas RA agendas are required in order for the RA to conduct business. *Some* form of basic record keeping in the form of transcripts and/or posting a summary of action to the forum is necessary.

As a further extrapolation, "farming out" a necessary function could reasonably require payment, but this is where I tread carefully. If we allow that given the burden of the accounting a treasurer should be paid, then what happens when the treasurer assumes the governmental role over that position (as Sudane did)?

It may be simpler to establish an extemely nominal payment for government work, despite my opposition, to avoid these questions. After all, the city can just credit against the person's land fees in most cases. But it doesn't mean I'll like it - and I don't.

I know this is tangentially related. Ok, say you had a spending bill. Something like:

Civil service payroll will be allocated in equal thirds to each branch. In each branch, 1/2 of the payroll will be awarded to elected officials, the other half to civil service jobs which may optionally be filled by elected members of that branch. In all cases it is up to each branch to decide how many and which posts are created, how much each post is compensated and who fills each post. The amount of payroll is a line item in the monthly budget spending bill.

You may have noticed that we don't have an influx of immgrants. As someone who immigrated 7 years ago to the United States from Canada, let me shed some light on this. A minority of immgrants flee due to persecution, war, strife, or lack of liberty. In all cases immigrants leave for a new country in search of a better life and a better quality of life, which usually means a higher socioeconomic status.

Roughly 80% of all immigration occurs for economic reasons. People want quality, high paying jobs. It's all about the jobs. We have no jobs. And BTW citizens should have first crack at those jobs. Voila, I now have a reason to become a citizen. The discounted land use fee is already in effect for renters in other sims. Paying jobs that "don't suck" is a good way to attract immigrants. Yes, they're on the public rolls. What you really need (of course), is private enterprise to create jobs.

The current state of this Sim reminds me of the time I spent in Mistassini (Cree Indian reserve in Quebec). Half the jobs are in local gov't. Quality of life goes up when private sector jobs become available.

Volunteerism should be held in very high esteem, and recognized. A bit like a civic value or duty.