will groups get a land allotment?

Beyond increasing the power or discount rate on groups (more prims or lower costs, etc), what else do you think we need to do to support groups well? How could we manage this differently?

Groups are vital to SL.

Giving an advantage to groups must be carefully considered to be sure it isn't trivially gameable (everyone belongs to group "super-duper" and therefore uniformly everyone in SL pays less, which then doesn't advantage groups, etc).

Also, the balance of power between groups and individuals seems very important to design carefully... too much advantage to groups and you get something that looks very corporate very fast.

A second level above or below Officer would be nice.

The extra privs that Officer status gives over Member status is good, but there are situations where you need one or two people in overall control, but still give Officer privs to several others...

For example, in a "corporate group" you could have the overall boss, a handfull of managers and lots of standard members.

A themed village could have council leaders, council members and villagers.

Or maybe even allow us to define just how many layers in the group structure we want, even if the only difference is the title we get.

I certainly dont want to see groups get too much advantage, but even a modest benefit would help tremendously. Rather than asking members to over-allocate to the group, a situation where we could under-allocate even by a small margin, would at least give members some sense of benefit. Restricting the advantage to group-owned land would help limit exploits.

I agree with Surina on having more officer-style levels. That would be very helpful.

How to improve groups? Here's a few suggestions, repeated again:

1. PRIM ALLOCATION BY SIM NOT BY PARCEL. Allow someone who owns land in a sim to build ANYWHERE there, not just on their own land.

Virtually everything in Gray is going to be destroyed because it's currently set up the other way, at least until group land is implemented again.

2. Dwell sucks, but all the same, AWARD DEVELOPER CREDITS TO GROUPS.

3. Dwell sucks, but all the same, AWARD DWELL AND OTHER GROUP AWARDS PROPORTIONALLY TO THE AMOUNT OF LAND DONATED BY THE MEMBER.

4. GET RID OF PRIM DEEDING. As anyone who has tried this has discovered, it disables a lot of script functions and you run the risk of everyone losing the ability to use the prims at all, if the permissions are not set exactly right. This is a boobytrap for groups rather than a help.

5. GIVE GROUPS A LAND DEBT GRACE PERIOD. Because of the danger of a large land donator wandering off without warning, allow groups to carry an allocation debt for a month's account period before any real life account action takes place.

6. HIT ONLY OFFICERS WITH LAND RATE PENALTIES. Since only officers are allowed to deed or release group land, only officers should be responsible for the consequences if they fail to manage the land allocations wisely. This will allow more people to join groups without immediately facing a financial danger from it.

That's my 2, er, 6 cents.

my original suggestion, reiterated by bel, grant groups a land allotment. let members deed foo m^2 to a group without it counting against their personal allotment.

i really don't think that too much to ask. it's a fabulous incentive for people to form groups and cooperate in order to have some freely alloted project land.

I thought of another one that might help groups (especially large ones) benefit their members:

7. DISTRIBUTION TO GROUP: This would be an option that allows you to send an item (such as a script or notecard) or cash to every member in a group without having to bring up each of their individual calling cards. This way if a group has a big windfall or has developed some object, technology or outfit, it can be given freely and equally to all the members. It becomes a perk of membership. This is different than the current automatic distribution of cash, too, because it would be voluntary.

Yet another suggestion.

8. SHORT GRACE PERIOD FOR LAND DONATORS. It appears right now that donating land to a group is a complicated procedure, with several hazards. If a group member is currently holding their own land for a group, and wants to donate it, he'll need to hand over his allocation (or part of it). And he'll need to transfer the land itself to the group (by allowing deed, I assume). But if he gets rid of his allotment before getting rid of the land, won't he get hit by a rate hike? And if he releases the land, money is lost when the group buys it. If he deeds the land first, that means the group as a whole will need at least that much spare allotment or get hit by rate hikes.

So I'm proposing that the group member be allowed to donate his allotment and have at least until the end of the day to get rid of the land before rate hikes hit.

Ananda - the approval period for land use tax changes I believe will be 24hrs, so this should work OK.

Ananda, some answers below:

How to improve groups? Here's a few suggestions, repeated again:

1. PRIM ALLOCATION BY SIM NOT BY PARCEL. Allow someone who owns land in a sim to build ANYWHERE there, not just on their own land.

That is how it works! In 1.2 prim allocation is related to total land in sim. You can put prims on any parcel.

2. Dwell sucks, but all the same, AWARD DEVELOPER CREDITS TO GROUPS.

Group dwell payments made to individuals are counted in the dwell totals used for awards, so this is being done now. We are thinking about whether to do something that rewards whole groups separately, but that is another issue.

3. Dwell sucks, but all the same, AWARD DWELL AND OTHER GROUP AWARDS PROPORTIONALLY TO THE AMOUNT OF LAND DONATED BY THE MEMBER.

Right now it is done evenly. Doing it by land donated seems illogical since often the question of who actually bought/donated land to a group is arbitrary relative to their worth. Thoughts?

4. GET RID OF PRIM DEEDING. As anyone who has tried this has discovered, it disables a lot of script functions and you run the risk of everyone losing the ability to use the prims at all, if the permissions are not set exactly right. This is a boobytrap for groups rather than a help.

In 1.2, you will only need to deed prims that are intended to collect money or sell objects where profit is meant for the whole group. Otherwise if group building is enabled, the prims can just stay yours. Good point.


5. GIVE GROUPS A LAND DEBT GRACE PERIOD. Because of the danger of a large land donator wandering off without warning, allow groups to carry an allocation debt for a month's account period before any real life account action takes place.

We will have some sort of overage/grace on group allocations, yes.


6. HIT ONLY OFFICERS WITH LAND RATE PENALTIES. Since only officers are allowed to deed or release group land, only officers should be responsible for the consequences if they fail to manage the land allocations wisely. This will allow more people to join groups without immediately facing a financial danger from it.


There will never be a change in your rate tier as a result of group land changes. You have to allocate - your group can never take from you. So I think this is as you want it.

Thanks Philip!

I've been getting conflicting info on the first question, so (*whew), I am really glad to hear that if I've got something that happens to be on a different parcel it won't just go away.

Regarding proportional vs. equal group awards, I think there needs to be a mechanism that recognizes that some group members are willing to go the extra mile to help their group and to actively participate while others are simply casual users or pretty much inactive. Giving more reward for more risk would be a good way to encourage more active involvement.

Using group land donations as an indicator of their value to the group is at least as good as dwell is an indicator of value to the community.

I'm not sure I follow your answer to no. 6:


What exactly would happen if a group went into debt on their land holdings then?

Ok, here's a few more that would help out cooperative projects, whether by a group or not:

9. FULL-FLEDGED "GRANT MODIFY PERMISSIONS" This is a great tool to use when you fully trust someone to help with your projects. Unfortunately, it started generating bizarre results when mixed with the 1.1 permissions tools. For instance, if an object didn't have Next Owner may modify or copy checked, you could copy the original object all over the place and end up with a bunch of copies no one could do anything with. So, fully enable this feature. If I grant it to someone, that means I utterly trust them with my stuff and I want them to be able to act on it as I would.

-Allow them to set permissions
-Allow them to lock/unlock the object
-Allow them to make copies without the copy switching ownership.

10. GRANT REVOCABLE PRIM RIGHTS: This would be an option to allow a landowner to give temporary access to their whole prim allotment to someone else. Then when the other person is done building, it can be taken back and the prims either get cleaned up or the builder transfers ownership.

This will allow reputable contract building and event planning services to operate - two of the most valuable trades in our community.

In particular this would give them the opportunity to keep building over a longer period of time without worrying about hitting the temporary object limits in the sim.

bump

No new ideas yet but IMO the last two are pretty important!

Edit:

Actually I did have a small one to add:

11. ALLOW PLACEMENT OF TREES ON GROUP LAND. Help keep SL beautiful.

You can do this I believe, just switch Edit Land on, place your trees then switch it off again.

Aha! Another "undocumented feature". Thanks Cailyn.

I think the answer to this is pretty simple and has been mentioned before.

Have a point system within the group. The more points you have compared to the other group members the larger the share of the profits you get.

It's kinda like the personal rating system but only officers should be able to give points to members. Any officer can decide to award/remove points from any member by any X amount. The idea being that the group member who contributes the most gets the most.

Officers could also setup automatic point awarding. For example a member might automatically receive 10 points every week he or she is in the group. Or a member might get 100 points for a set amount of land donation.

This system should be viewable by the whole group so each member knows how he or she is rated in the group.

The basic idea is to give the officers control on how money is given out.

If a point system is to complex allow the officers to give out real money (real $L that is) to each group member on tax day. Profit on tax day is dumped into a general account from which officers may hand out to members as they see fit. Of course, again, make this whole process viewable by the whole group so everyone knows what's going on.

You may even think about making a higher level group position beyond officers with added ability to handle all of this money stuff.

What do you think?

Absolutely if groups were given the rights to actually manage group accounts and not simply watch them empty out every week, this would be enormously helpful!

I'd be all for it. I do understand the point that this would give groups too much power relative to the individual, but a compromise where the accounts dumped but groups could choose whether to assign this equally, proportionally to land donations, or a mix would be wonderful!

Bump.

It turns out you can't put trees on group land after all. I'd like this option.

Now that 1.2 has arrived, many questions have been answered. But I'm still hoping to understand how current group land will be handled, and how we can transfer land held by individual group members over to the group as a whole. It turns out this will be of great benefit because that way, all the prims in the sim will be freed up to be used where people want them and not spread out among a variety of small and awkward parcels.

This is what I'm looking at:

1. Group member "A" has 4096m^2 of land, and wants to turn it over to the group. So, she assigns her allocation to the group. She now has 24hrs to get it deeded. She gets the Officer to deed it in time, using the allocation that now belongs to the group.

Is that the procedure?

Here's the tricky scenario:

Currently the group holds 1/8th of a sim in land deeded pre-1.2. Since I can't imagine giving every group any free land, I imagine what will happen is that we'll get a grace period once allotment deeding is allowed, to try and collect the necessary amount to cover the land already deeded.

Here's hoping we get some news soon. Jan 12th is looking like a day that will live in infamy if we don't. (Especially with all the people who were out of town and have yet to confirm their land holdings on the website).