Neaultenberg is Necessary

If there were no problems, this would be utopia. We all know that is unattainable. There will always be problems. We are after all humans and as I have stated before, we are in this case faceless ones and a lot of us see other players as nothing more than digital. I will never trust other player's to resolve disputes. I have stated why several times within this thread and apparently the answers aren't good enough for you or you are ignoring them.

You seem to be taking the further step of making these *problems* into some sort of imminent crisis. I have seen the player governments in TL, UO, TSO. They made it worse. As someone pointed out above you think we have disputes now, just wait until we have other players deciding who is right and who is wrong. The Lindens are not perfect but they are far and above more impartial than any player body could ever be.

As I said above, LL's staff will grow with the subscription base, and a part of that will most likely lead to a couple of people at least who deal solely with player disputes.

Now can you please clarify, as I seem to be misinterpreting your responses as inconsistent, whether or not you think an SL wide, player run government with a judicial branch is what SL needs? Or are you talking about some sort of feudal system of principalities and city states? If it is the latter, what becomes of the LL ToS? We will have this checker board of different ways of dealing with conflicts which I promise you will lead to more strife and claims of imparity and possible RL litigation. What of the no man's lands created by this segregation? There is a reason feudal systems and city states went the way of the dinosaur, and we are all better for that.

You speak of hyperbole, yet that is what I see in your assumptions about why SL needs player run dispute arbitration.

As far as ad hominem goes, I hope you weren't referring to me and if so, could you please point out where I have attacked you?

If I might point out --as someone involved in Neualtenburg-- I don't view it as necessary at all. In another thread I compared it with characters in SL who have wings.

They don't need the wings, they can already fly.
But they like having them because it adds to their enjoyment of the world.

To me -- The Neualtenburg Projekt is a pair of wings.

Wear'em -- Don't wear'em.

Don't compare your silly project with my beautiful wings. And I DO need them. Cherubs are just fat babies without their wings.

Toy, this thread has always been about player disputes, or at least my contribution.

The very first paragraph:



I couldn't fit that in the title.

Nolan, I definitely was never referring to you Your posts are great. Though, I must say, it's good to keep you a little combative cause it will all get pointless if you started agreeing with me all the time.

I don't believe in SL wide anything.

I do believe we need to make strides in dispute resolution. NBerg is one of those strides, and I believe a necessary one. I have heard a lot of poopooing NBerg, but I have yet to hear a reasonable alternative on how to handle p2p disputes where there are no pre-arranged contracts.

I personally would like a series of sims I can go to where the rules are just and fair and I don't have to worry about griefers or anyone who bans me simply because he doesn't like the color my avatar's skin, or because I love the sound of my own typing (which I do!). And where if someone is lagging the sim, I have a real recourse other than to wait forever to LL to get around to my bug report. Or where I don't have to worry about hate speech.

I'm saying this is an imminent crisis? I'm not sure how you infered that. I think it will become a crisis at some point if we don't start thinking and tackling the problem now.


Kendra, you may find that this is one area where your ideas are going to start falling down. I've read through your threads, and I find you focusing on a lot of unnecessary things. Like Donovan said .. start with a bill of rights, start with what is necessary.

agreed!

What you dont seem to understand is, Nolan the vast majority of the members are happy the way things are. When I joined SL I in effect signed an agreement which is the TOS and CS. I wouldnt have signed on if it anywhere stated I must accept a player ran dispute council.
Enough said, my movie is over and going to bed.

*Confused* Why is this addressing me, I agree with you Toy...

Depends on your definition of necessary. The things I'm working on I do find necessary.
And I'm proceeding from a point of origin of what I, as an artist, in a digital world would like to inhabit.

I grant you might not find them necessary, but I actually do.

Toy, no one is saying you need to accept player run government. The point I'm trying to make that it is a necessary solution to p2p dispute resolving where there are no pre-arranged contracts (I added the last 6 few words recently.. should have put that in my original message).

Another example -- look at Anshe Chung. So many people in this game absolutely detest land barons.

Yet Linden labs does nothing about it .. they continue to exist.

This is a massive dispute which is not getting resolved .. but it could be resolved in NBerg if handled intelligently.

Kendra says:





Perhaps you might want to resolve your inner conflict before disagreeing with my original hypothesis.

I don't have an inner conflict. I don't find Neualteburg ncessary for SL as a system wide OS.

I find what I'm doing in Neualtenburg necessary for me.

See how that works?

You have an outtie? Can I see?

Kendra, thanks for the clarification. I too do not find it necessary as a system wide government.

I do however feel it's a necessary step in solving the problem of player to player disputes.

There is a pre-arranged contract, you agree to it when you create your account. If you feel someone has breached the policies contained therein, you have several avenues of recourse.

As much as I don't care for some land barons I would never be party to allowing other players to decide their fates. Not even the really bad ones. That is so open to witch hunting it makes my head spin to even imagine it. Do I think LL needs to be more proactive with regard to some of the baron situations? Yes. Let's not forget they have taken steps in the past with regards to that issue. So saying they have done nothing about it is not true. Saying it still needs improvement would certainly be true. It's an issue they are aware of and will most certainly continue to watch and tweak as they see fit.

I'm just pointing out that my process isn't very different than what it seems to me Donovan is suggesting -- the systems I'm attempting to work out in Neualtenburg's artist guild are based on what I percieve as artist's needs within SL.

Admittedly, I'm working from my own perspective from my own "life" as an artist avatar
in SL --but it seems to me the only valid starting point that I --personally--can work from.

Anything else would be pure speculation on my part.

Nolan, you have proposed a solution which is interesting. LL just hires more people. Simple and effective but has two problems

1) Expensive and doesn't scale well
2) A certain amount of liability and bad PR for LL if things go sideways because the resolution was poorly done.


For example, I know someone who was doing a very large build in a sandbox. Before doing the build he shouted out 5 times he was about to do a big build and if anyone had a problem please tell him.

An LL CSR came along and wiped it all out a few minutes later without warning.

Now there are no official rules about big builds in the Sanbox. And he did ask everyone's permission. And the CSR could have said, hi, I'm about to wipe out your build in 60 seconds.

The problem here was that the CSR didn't warn the person and wiped out some very important work that the person had been working on.

In the end, being the nice guy he was, didn't really raise a stink about it. However, there will be cases in the future where someone will not be so nice and will want recourse of some kind. With LL, there is very little recourse. Niether do they really want to be in a position where people are complaining about their actions like this.

With a democratically elected player government, that representative could be voted out quite quickly. Or not! As the case may be. Also, LL wouldn't have a lot of liability for what players are doing to each other. Especially when those players have agreed to be governed.


Kendra, you might want to take a look at ESR's famous document, the cathedral and the bazaar. You may also want to refer to the creative commons website as well. There are some interesting ideas there about what's necessary and what's not.

N-berg is unnecessary for any sort of player disputes.. It is equally unneecssary if the dispute involves a player and LL.

The sole purposes it seems to fill are the following.... all non-necessities in my not-so-humble opinion:
1. a pretty build
2. a specific area to allow some people to play at politics on the same level that they once played "house" at as kids --- that is, nothing "done" within the confines of the sim have any reality outside the sim, unless and until they spill outside it - deliberately or accidentally. Note: all forums outside of the group's own forum is "spillage outside the group's domain.)
3. a specific area where a specific group can profit at the expense of others - literally and figuratively. Literally in that only certain people will share the profits - profits actually subsidized by non-project SLers via their land tier fees I might add. Figuratively in so many ways it is almost impossible to describe coherently - let's just leave it at "by specifically being in a Linden-recognized 'superior' position of authority and power than the rest of the group/non-citizens who accidentaly/delliberately venture into the project sim.
4. an area where attention from outside SL itself "may" be expected whether this fails or not - media attention for the leadership.

None of this spells "necessity" in any dictionary I know.

Korg, yeah, I agree there are a lot of dangers there and you are one of the few that actually points them out for what they really are.

I applaud you because you've thought through some stuff I'm just hoping will go away. You should go post in the nburg forums so that everyone is aware of what's going on.

In the end though, I think the nburg people will find that they're pretty much ignored except when things go haywire and someone needs to make a decision about a dispute.

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." -Thomas Jefferson.

So you're suggesting non-Neualtenburg residents should take their disputes to Neualtenburg for litigation? That's what I am trying to get at here, and I think I understand where you are going with this now, however, I am not sure that this is how the projekt's members see their role in the community. That said, I would have no problem if and when two people from outside the city agree to participate in player arbitration, although you will never convince me that it's necessary.

As far as LL scaling up they simply have to, they have no choice other than to fail. Any business, I don't care if it's picking cotton, has to scale their staff for growth. It's a fundamental of growing a business.

The sandbox example was not a player to player dispute as far as I see and LL is God. They can do whatever they want.

Ah, I see now. By basing our government on classic liberal assumptions from the Enlightenment, specifically that environment modifies power, need, and human behavior, we have ignored the fact that SL is an engineered environment designed to encourage certain kinds of behavior. So what you're saying is that we should define the differences between RL and SL and understand what they imply for power, politics, rights, and responsibilities.

I think you're waxing obtuse as a defensive mechanism because I confronted you for criticizing our government. I assume there was some truth to my statement that you were overstating your depth of reading in our forum to legitimize your criticisms in the eyes of the general audience. It's OK. I do it all the time too.

What I would suggest is, instead of wasting our time debating your above statement, that you join our project as a deep thinker. We have a Philosophic branch, whose sole purpose is to think creatively for the city. If you're interested, I'll send you an invitation and move you into the branch as a senior member immediately. If this is too much, then please contribute to the forum as an external participant. Your knowledge is too precious to be wasted on defensive counterpoints. Let's make history and have fun doing it!

~Ulrika~

Nope. Not a member of the group.. so I do not post in their forum - except possibly accidentally.

They are certainly entitled to try their theory.

As soon as their stuff spills out of their little sandbox, and the General forum is outside of their little sandbox, then I feel justified in saying my piece.

Believe it or not, I respect the attempt - despite its being doomed to failure from its inception as I honestly feel it is.

And that, in one simple post, is why I see the project doomed to failure. Project "originators"/current leaders are not following their own proposal for the community's conduct - they are/she is deliberately and consciously forming the "mini-society" in her desired image, not as the community may or may not wish.

Specifically, this statment - "I'll send you an invitation and move you into the branch as a senior member immediately." is the death-knell for any possibility for success. If one person can install another in such a position, without approval of or consultation with anyone else, then that is "absolute power" invested in one person. As Wshington said whenhe was offerd the "kingship" of the US after the Revolutionary War, "You would replace one king with another?" The first king, LL.. The second - Ulrika?

The other "concern" that spells disaster, is the condescension in the post itself - "...you're waxing obtuse...instead of wasting our time debating your above statement". How can someone who is offered a postion as a "deep thinker" expect to have his/her opinnion valued when the project leader is so insulting in an open and very public forum? I think that statement speaks volumes about what to expect.

Ulrika - you are obviously determined - and obviously intelligent. To see you engage in such self-defeating behavior is actually almost painful to watch. Sorry, but as a rhetorician, that is a "professional opinion" you might want to consider.

Um... not really. I'm saying that government is the exercise of power, and power is determined by a complex relationship between citizens and the circumstances/environment that forms their context. To frame a government, you have to understand what the context is, and what it demands in government. In this case -- it's a virtual world, different-by-definition than the real one. Framing a government without understanding or debating the context -- rights, responsibilities, definitions, environment -- is simply not thinking hard enough about the relevant issues and their practical applications.



Um... no. I really don't have enough invested in this argument or topic to feel defensive about you disagreeing with me. I don't really need to overrepresent myself, nor play for a general audience, either. When you do what I do for a living, disagreements are commonplace, defensiveness is a luxury that cannot be afforded, and playing for a general audience is a good way to get eaten alive. I get baited a lot, too -- by people who hope I will lose my cool -- and I've generally learned to respond with a big friendly smile.



See?



Um... gosh. If I'm wasting your time, why are you asking me to join as a "deep thinker" and proposing to make me a senior member? Why -- Ulrika! I think you're much more complex, clever, and ruthless than most of us suspected.... I think you're moving on many different levels here -- confusing me, disarming me, charming me, including me, and then shunting me into abstract exercises in philosophy. What a masterful performance in the practical politics of dealing with powerful but impractical suggestions! I'm stunned!



There's that big friendly smile again.

ed.sp.

Seriously! I'd do back flips to have you contribute to the project in whatever way you'd like. Having Donovan Galatea in the group would be like catching a unicorn. I know the chances are slim but I have your attention and thought I'd take advantage of it.

~Ulrika~

I'd like to thank everyone in the thread for keeping this civil and even semi-intelligent despite obvious frustration and miscommunication.

Now let it die already! Blaze expressed why he's said it's necessary, other people have expressed why they don't think it is. Thread over. Or, as I pointed out half a dozen pages ago, thread over before it began because it's just an irresponsible repost of an old topic.