SL Corporations

I know you were not initially looking for a scripted solution for these features, but I see no other way. In the case of salary, how would a company determine that the employee being paid actually performed their assigned duties?
I would not trust a system to automatically pay each member of a large corporation automatically, I think this would have to be a job assigned to a real person, preferably the owner or trusted treasurer.



I see where you are going with this. But once again, I can't see allowing someone to automatically be allowed to deduct a set amount of money each week.
You may say there would have to be trust....my reply would be then, why do we need new tools if they require trust?


I agree.



An interesting idea. I think it opens a whole lot of IP questions and potential problems. Also the permissions system may have to be reworked to accomodate such a request.

I am not trying to piss on your parade, I am just trying to grasp how exactly these changes, if implemented, would benefit SL.

Can you please give a hypothetical example using a ficticious company and $L amounts using the proposed features?

Thanks.

No, no, you aren't pissing on anyones parade. This is what I am looking for, constructive critisism.

I see where you are going with the trust issue. Usually you have to trust someone if you are going to hire them no matter what. So lets assume everyone you hire has a certain amount of trust.

Say I hire a sales associate for SL Designs (if this is someones company im sorry, its just an example.) to sell the latest desings of clothes that we produce. Then there is a manager over the sales associate. The manager could be the owner, or someone hired to manage the associates. Either way there is someone overseeing the sales. There could be a different way of doing this as well. Each person has a unique id in SL, somehow this could be attached to the product sold by that associate. On second thought, this would be difficult to implement from a programming view.

But anyways, I can this working. I know it would work for me, and a few other people I know. So far i'm left with designing a business in a box solution and selling it so other people can do this easily. I know Ginko Finacial has made the "work arounds" work for them. I wonder if they would be interested in this feature.

When it's all said and done, I don't see LL running out to make a new feature or revise the groups feature set so business is easier.

The main idea behind this thread was to get some input on peoples ideas about the topic. There is a lot of things that would need to be worked out. Obviously we would all need to vote on the features we would most want in this new feature. Then LL would design it to their specifications.

The things I want to do can be worked out in a script, that is unless I run out of room. If the Lindens didn't want to add any business features, then I would ask for more room in the scripting area so out scripts could be longer and provvide more functionality.

Kim, I'm afraid my remarks, however lurid and off-topic and irritating you find them, are quite ON topic because they get to the heart of the matter: the culture of the game. It is not a climate that promotes business. In fact, there is a distinct promotion of the small, but vocal anti-business minority. That's not about bias against people in Toledo or San Francisco. It's about reporting on the REALITY of making investments of thousands of US dollars, and then not having PROTECTION of them. I know, since I do this, that this is a distinct reality, so I'm trying to cut to the heart of the matter -- the reason why the Lindens don't make this a priority, the reason why two years have gone on without it, and even another year is to go on without fixing these blasted flawed group tools. CULTURE. and ATTITUDE.

Joe, everything you're talking about indeed has to be done with changing the group tools. If you leave them as they are, in their flawed capacity, people remain at risk and corporations don't grow. The ten percent incentive for free tier on land is still a draw as we know from other threads, but people grouping their land to get this bonus place their land at terrible risk -- from each other and griefing members of the "community".

You can design some new scripted thing but that will be an add-on, and will only paper over the difficulties in the flawed groups which people will still use. Right now there are groups in the game -- you mentioned Ginko -- that pay employees salaries, pay them commissions, pay them incremental wages, and do everything you wish, either manually, or by tweaking the tools, putting employees in different groups with differen statuses. We don't have contract law, but the transaction history and the Linden TOS and oversight, to some extent, gives us enough of an environment where we can get started.

People make "investments" with levels of tier donation. People deed group objects to the group to pay out the income to the object only to those in one group. They make another group and put vendors on that group. It's all a very clunk system but people do get it to work. Usually on the strength of an IM, not even an animated handshake.

You simply must advocate that the group tools change. Everyone in business in SL in any fashion has to get behind this, so that their fellow businessmen in groups can stop having to face the risking of their land by flawed group tools!

There are already raffle machines and estate auction scripts that people have scripted, and various games, that could be modified to make a stock market of sorts. It's not impossible to imagine. But we do need to get the tools changed.

Here's a cross post from other threads where I've discussed group FUNCTIONS and how, if you made each one a toggle by the group founder or primary investor, you can get anything from a corporation to a dungeon to function:

What I would advocate is a changing of the group functions and a new perception of them as functions, not roles, and not types of groups. This way, anyone, whether a landlord setting up tenants, a business creating a CEO and a board of trustees, hippies in a commune, a tsar setting up his boyars and serfs, an artist setting up his collaborators, or a dom his subs, could use the group tools for whatever they like.

Here's the list of 24 functions that would then be toggled in various configurations, starting with the founder, who get all of the privileges, and gets to decide who else gets them, mixing and matching as needed:

o Founds Group, Pays $100
o Names Group
o Invites Members
o Expels Members
o Invites Officers
o Expels Officers
o Names Titles
o Pays Purchase Price of Land
o Pays For and Donates Tier
o Names Land and Describes Land
o Puts Land in Find Places
o Sets Landing Point
o Returns Prims
o Parcels Land
o Sets Music/Video
o Sells Land
o Purchases Land or Deeds Land (to move from individual to group or group to group)
o Takes Land Out of Group
o Announces Events
o Makes Proposals for Votes
o Sends Group IMs
o Deeds Objects
o Collects and Distributes Income
o Collects and Distributes Dwell
o Terraforms and Landscapes

These 24 functions would be mixed and matched up by the founder or founders -- the first thing the original founder did if he wanted would be to click off the "founder" full set of toggles for 2 other people or the more limited list of toggles for "officer" or still less for "member" title -- thus toggling for every permission he'd like them to have.

While it might seem some work at the beginning, it will be a huge boon for a club or a mall, for example to be able to have members that can just return prims, or just set music, or just deed created objects, or have the full range of permissions if they wish.

Collects/distributes income and dwell will have to be new functions that contain configurable number boxes that will work like prices do in SL.

Joe, I'm well aware that when you and others see someone writing about "Reds" and "California" and "hippies" you might think "loon" and just screen it out. But I can't think of a quicker, faster, way to get you and others to pay attention to the very real looming problem we have here with these group tools: culture and attitude.

I've looked at your proposition, and you don't need to mount it and get it passed as a specially-created add-on to the game -- "make a corporation" or "business in a box" *if you get the group tools changed*. You think the solution is just leave the lousy group tools alone. But that's to leave everyone in projects and group land now -- and there are thousands -- to their fate. Don't do that. Instead, work to change the group tools.

Let me take your proposition point by point:



Currently, the group has its own account where all proceeds come into the menu, and are redistributed it equally to every member. So you want the proceeds to come, but you want the owner or CEO or initial investor, and a group of select officers, to be the ones to decide "collect and distribute income". So have that function one that is togglable and configurable in the groups.



We already have this in group land. The way to make it protected from theft is to remove officer recall by members, and make only the owner or principle investor the person who can make officer recalls.



This is "collectc and distribute income". You also need a way for the CEO as an individual to add income into the group. Currently the workaround for that is to sell yourself 16m of land for whatever amount you need to pump into your group. Silly. So it needs a money menu that works like pricing and paying.



This is my concept of having FUNCTIONS that the owner TOGGLES. You don't think up elaborate roles with sets of functions that each person then has as a package in their role, programmed into the game. You just take the list of functions -- add to the 24 if you want (I used the existing ones mainly) -- and you toggle them up or down with permissions.


This is currently achieved in most businesses I see by making different groups with different permissions. I'm thinking this might be very hard to program as a menu to configure and I'd be happy as a workaround just to have more capacity to join groups -- currently the limit is 15.



If you have a group object that the group CEO can take the proceeds from and configure for distribution -- a menu that all the officers/boards of trustees can see on their games too to prevent skimming -- you will be able to achieve this. The group object is a bank terminal or an object that the investor pays like a casino or any object, and he can get back a dispensed object like a lottery ticket that is his "share". He rezzes it in world like a lottery ticket to make the number come out on it, to link it to a website, whatever. He then puts it back in inventory. Just to mention one method for doing this.

It seems to me that you have to decide what SL is before you can begin to answer Schwanson's question.

If the business aspect of SL is "real", then what is needed is a synergistic combination of technical solutions and "real world" or "real world style" law and order. You must either correlate SL business law and enforcement with real world equivalents - allowing, for example, SL contracts to be enforceable in RL courts, and SL residents to be subject to SEC rules and FDIC rules; or - you must create RL equivalents in SL, courts, SEC-type rules, etc., enforceable by auditing, fines, banishment, seizure of property, etc., along with institutions, authorities, and bureaucracies that are responsible for such areas.

If you're calling for a "real" or "realistic" economy in SL, complete with corporate and financial nuances, there's little else you can do - unless you are indeed advocating a "utopian" experiment completely outside the bounds of the present economic reality.

Any technical solution - any at all - would proceed out of your initial decision as to the nature of SL. Publication of the law, detection of violations, enforcement, administrative and legal procedures, etc., would all require technical groundwork.

If the business aspect of SL is a "game", however, then you can pretty much game the economy however you like. What's needed up front, for the sake of clarity as well as good ethics, is that common recognition: This is not real life, nor analogous to real life, this is a fascinating, complex, and amusing 21st century equivalent to Monopoly. Then the value of Lindens, of residents' time, of created product and the market for commodities, etc., all become clear - zero, of course, but fun.

I see a fair number of people, not necessarily anyone posting to this thread, however, who "want it both ways". SL is serious business, until it ceases to be fun; SL is fun until the valuation of a "game" doesn't seem to cover the effort, time, and capital involved; order in SL is necessary until someone tells me what I can and cannot do; SL is cool because I can do whatever I want, until chaos threatens the valuation of my property and status in SL.

If you want to run a corporation or a securities and exchange or some other RL feature in SL, you have to make big choices and accept big consequences first - real, game, or utopian. Calling for "contract law" that works has enormous implications.

I agree, Seth, that people want it to be a game until it's not fun or they want it to be RL-like when making money until they need a game-like subsidy. But I think the solution to that is to leave it alone, let the two merge without creating a firewall and create check gates at most to move along the canals to the sea.



I find this is what is problematic about a lot of SL. So often you see first the creation of a technology, or first the creation of an unintended by-product of technology, then a scramble to fix it with more technology, instead of a basic pondering and decision up front before the creation of the world as to whether it would be capitalist or socialist.
They tried to skip over the war of the social systems down through the ages, under one name or another, and pretend they could just program their way out of it. I'm not even certain they thought very hard about what a social system is and how to make it. I think they just went along and made 3D tools to draw and create, then said, oh, wow, let's add group tools, then oh cool, let's add a land market. I think we can see from the results that is the case.

SL, for better or worse, is an evolving amalgamation of commual utopian ideals, mideval trade, land barony, guilds and corporations. As I said, SL is evolving and admittedly, there is a power struggle (as much as some would like to dismiss it) between those who hold the communal utopian ideals and those who are avidly pro-commerce/corporation. As one would know, I am squarly in the camp of the pro-commerce/corporation and am excited by the opportunities SL provides to explore that.

With that said, I strongly believe that we need two seperate structures: One for groups and one for corporations. Both need more than adequate tools to better serve the founder/founders. I am liking some of the ideas put forth as to how those structures and tools should be. There are other ideas that assualt my senses a bit.

As before, I proposed for the corporations, the ability to sell shares in order to raise capital for purchases and operations. I also proposed the institution of a stock market where those who have invested in corporations can buy, sell and trade those stocks. I would go a step further in the structure of the corporations, to mirror RL a bit and that is the different types, as they are here in the States: Single Propriotership, Partnerships, Limited Liability Corporations, Class S and Class C Corporations.

I appreciate everyone's views and looking forward to reading more of them.

Business is a specialized subset of group. It makes more sense to have one configurable tool that can be customized by players for a variety of different groups than for the developers to try to provide a different tool for each new type of group that comes along.

Prok's toggles are a sound approach.

Prok's insistance that this is a cultural issue isn't something I want to argue right now. Other days, other threads.

Corporations, by the very definition, are not a subset of a group, so why should they be burdened with the communal utopianism that is inherent in SL groups? By seperating the two, instead of making one inferior to the other, you create two structures that offer vastly different options, thus better management control.

Timmy,

I agree that more granulated and denser tools are needed for these more sophisticated functions but I hardly think LL is going to do this. If you look at their direction so far, they've focused on the technology of streaming and 3-D production itself and content creation. Land has been a distinct second, but still a sidebar at times. They don't seem to be interested in player government very much (except when they are LOL) and they keep talking about how they are only building the scaffolding for the users to make the world.

I find that a crock, because they hardwired into the scaffolding so many presuppositions (the tekkie wiki, the hippie commune, etc.) that they can't claim that fairly. They thingie they make will be so coloured as it spawns in the world that other people are likely to make really heavily competitive world-generators once Commune Spawn begins to replicate on the Internet -- as it is likely if they open-source part of it or all of it.

To prevent Commune Spawn and put in Business Spawn you either need LL to back down from Commune or you need to find other companies that can generate this entire metaverse thingie out of a box themselvs. I don't see EA.com doing that, and I think they're the only ones with that capacity, no? Maybe Sony might buy out both EA.com and LL or just LL, and then we might see it just become Entertainment Spawn.

There is a half-way house which I think is doable in a really rough-n-ready way which is to fix the tools of their most obvious flaws and vulnerabilities and make at least a rough approximation of different entities possible through toggles. I'm not at all happy with it but I suggest it only as doable.

I agree, fixing and enhancing the group tools is a good start. I am only hoping that LL (won't hold breath), will look far enough into the future to see that seperate structures for the communal utopian groups and the pro-commerce corporations are the best route to be working toward. One can dream for the perfect system, but it will only be dreaming.

Timmy, I'd like to think that the basic building blocks of civil society -- the association -- could be outfitted, kitted and boxed to make either a commune or a business. And even some uncivil society, like dungeons, without which most liberal civil society types will not want to have a world.

BUT the heart of the matter, social systems, types of property and ownership, can't be decided in the shop or from the desk, but have to be decided by a political process. That means elections and a player government. Most people say "go away" with that stuff.

If you try to make businesses first with no political structure, while you might imagine you're finally freeing yourself from all those bureaucrats who got in your way, in fact, you're just setting yourself up to be mobbed by irate customers, etc.

You need a judicial system and disputes resolution to function, not just business entity formation. So if you get to this idea of branching off group tools in two directions, I don't see how you can sustain them without all the other trappings of society like courts and police.

Ok I am doing a bypass here because I want to adress one thing. hreason California has the republican governator is that he repealed the car tax. In my mind the entire recall election was based on the trippling of vehicle registration fees, and Arnold's opposition to that. I know it seems simplistic, but I still think its true.

And Lawyers! Hehehe. Then we will see where are the money made by the land and content barons goes!

Corporations are groups, by definition. Unless you've got a corporation of one.

If you've got a tool that can handle both a corporate reporting hierarchy and a tribal government by consensus, that's a good tool. By having one flexible system rather than multiple systems, you avoid a great deal of unnecessary duplication of effort.

Focus on making the existing system more adaptable for the needs of all players, rather than wasting development time and money on a specialized system for one segment.

Hopefully you're right about LL priorities. Stability and performance issues affect us all. These are make or break issues that determine the long term viability of SL. Improved group tools would be nice, although right now the most common type of group is the sensible use of three alts to get the 10% land bonus. Business management tools would also be nice. There's a market for business simulation games, and those tools might encourage people to develop in-world business simulation games (with convertability into real money as an attractive player reward built into the game mechanics).

Because LL development resources must be prioritized it's up to the player base to lead the way. Player-run projects can develop the large specialized toolsets and run the websites to manage those efforts. Good examples are the currency exchanges, shopping sites and private island property leasing sites.

It's reasonable to study player-run efforts for a few iterations. Then when SL grows enough to support LL resource allocation to these areas we'll already have some idea of what works, and where the pitfalls lie.

Traxx,

Some players may believe they are "leading the way" for the Lindens, but others maybe "leading the way" in a different direction and I think it's fairly safe to say no player group has total influence over the Lindens.

Don Linden himself posted in "features" the query about reactions to the officer recall function and we know from town halls and other meetings that the Lindens put a lot of thought into group functions, advertising capacity for player businesses, etc.

Evidently, your business partners choose to keep "officer recall" to get rid of "bosses from hell" (never themselves LOL), and even use it on other groups LOL, but the overwhelming number of groups find it a huge nuisance and a significant vulnerability to protection of land rights. The Lindens recognize this, not only Don Linden has spoken here on the forums about it, Lee Linden has also spoken about the problem as have others. They recognize that the problem is a significant hole, and doesn't have to be "prioritized" down the list -- we've been assured that programming a group to have the founder in charge is the easier option, and that it actually takes more work to have the "all in common" option.

Some people in LL aren't running "business simulations" but actual businesses where they have a business plan and investors and profits and they cash out to the real world. Others might like to poke fun at them and call their businesses "hobbies" and "simulations" with "cash incentives" to "practice" but those individuals are the kind of pioneers needed to turn the game into something more real.

Off-game third-party sites don't abide by the TOS and aren't to be encouraged as a locus for business. It's interesting that they function and provide a service but the Lindens have absolutely no oversight over them, nor can the player base be protected from their possible abuses. To have them harvesting information, culling out personal information in the form of cell phone conversations, shopping habits, rental patterns, purchasing patterns, etc. can be troublesome if misused.

I'm for locating such business functions firmly within the game's tools so that players have an equal playing field and there is "federal government" oversight of activities of this nature that can easily become abusive *when there is no one to watch*.

When it came to content creation tools and copyright protection, there wasn't this notion of forcing of the player base to go through "iterations" before the Lindens stirred themselves to protect them. The same must be done for land ownership, and when it comes to corporations, the single worst feature of group tools now is officer recall, used to paralyze businesses, lose business, disrupt business, and attempt coups on people who paid for property or put tier on property.

All this talk about the game either needing to be for business or play is making me somewhat ill. Who says you can't have both? In RL there is both, so I think in SL there can be both as well. As far as speculating that LL didn't make this game for business then let me ask you this. Why is there money in the game? And why can you sell any item?

Without money there is no economy, there is no business. Sure, we might get a trading post, and trade some items for others, but that isn't a real economy as we all come to know. So lets stop saying that SL was designed for tree hugging hippies that need a utopia to smoke in.

Indeed, Joe, I heartily agree both can co-exist and don't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition, and indeed, you have to ask, if there is a land auction and cash in the game, and cash that cashes out to RL dollars, how can they be anti-business? How can it be about hippies? It must be just that Prok is raving.

I can only imagine that you haven't run up against these obstacles inworld and on the forums -- yet -- but you will.

There's a significant class of players that doesn't mind if there is my land, and my money, but doesn't want the game to be "commercialized". They'd like to make content, put out vendors, collect for their creations...but not see "speculators" and "middlemen" in the land business -- they are ebil!

They don't like the emphasis on land, property, auctions, land baroning. They think the parcels should either just be handed out or just made available in low-cost cooperatives.

The socialist experiment of Neualtenberg, originally sponsored by the Lindens (they got a free sim, paying no up front purchase price but just paying the tier), is a case in point -- a high profile nod to the socialism type of model.

Sure, have business, but have it be socially aware, environmentally sensitive, you know, Ben & Jerry's. Have it be low impact or low profit or only plough back its profits into non-profit work like sustaining the arts.

Some are very much pro-business as long as it is just their own business that gets to be privileged and successful over others, or as long as they remain at the top of the sector -- they don't want business to be competitive.

The various campaigns you see here -- let's kill the 10 percent incentive, let's kill private island deeds in the land list for sale, etc. -- that's the anti-business climate at work.

The group tools, the central device for managing sims and land and for cooperating in business, have significant holes as mentioned.

As for the "hippie" stuff it can be seen all over the forums and the game in the celebration of freebies, giving out stuff for free, doing things for free, working on projects that don't make a profit -- all fine -- but then sometimes scorning those who don't want a nonprofit experience in the game.

I'm all for everyone having their own ideas, opinions, and ways to play SL. I don't care if someone wants to pitch a tent next to my casino and call it home. I don't care if someone removes all the trees from their land in the middle of a forest. This is their SL as much as it is mine. Business is built into SL and as far as I can tell is the driving force behind it outside of content creation. But then I ask you this, without being able to sell your content, how many people would stay in SL? I'm sure a lot would, but having the OPTION of doing either is nice. I don't see why we can't have more options. Give the group tools to people that want to make socialist communities, but then give the same tools (different functions) to the people that want to create a business. If my dream is to build the largest monopoly of underwear dispensers then so be it. If LL lets us make companies with a new tool set then they should be able to charge the company some money. Every business has its costs, it's just the nature of things. So if they charge a L$2,000 startup fee or a percentage of revenue as a tax then thats fine with me. Give the money to the people that host events, or put on educational events. I know there is one person building a university, give him some of that money to help reduce his overhead.

In the end this is just a "game" no matter how you look at it. Although I see a grand future for this type of "game". If you were to desribe the internet to someone that has never seen a computer this is what they would invision. The commerce and creative capabilities of SL are unparralled. All LL has to do is keep up the good work and address the important requests as they come along. I don't think this feature I want to see is the most important at this time. I would like to see a Linux client first. However, LL has their own schedule and agenda as does every other company.

Well this thread is interesting. I don't have much to contribute except for saying that a corporation exists to shield the owners from legal liability for the debts (or other bad acts of a corporation). It is not strictly speaking a method of organizing a business, but rather it is a means to create a legal "person" that can act on its own behalf.

The core principle of business liability is the amount of control the owners have. thus is a sole proprietorship, and person is entirely laible for the debts of the business, but has total control over the business. In a corportation, an person's liability is limited to the number of shares they own of the corporation, but the individual owners have no control over the day to day running of the corporation-the board and the officers do that.

thus in a very real sense having any corporate structure requires a judicial system.

My original post was to give us some more tools. To let us have a "Business Account" for out lindens, to offer people titles and pay within our companies. I personally don't want my company to be a corporation. I don't like other people deciding my companies direction. If i wanted more money and needed investors then yes, a corporation would be what i would need. But I don't need their money. All I personally need is some tools, however I am looking at a larger picture for everyone. I think this would allow people to hold a steady job, or even work at two different jobs. People wouldn't need to stand around inside a store next to a meter or sit in a club all night to make some money.

I'm sure this will disappoint you, Prok, but Neualtenberg wasn't given a special deal because LL wanted to fan the flames of socialism. LL offered to waive the up front purchase price of land for any group that was willing to do a winter-themed build and cover its own tier. The Neualtenberg group was the only applicant, with their beautiful and wintery postmodern walled Bavarian town.

Joe, I have to disagree with your statement, "In the end this is just a 'game' no matter how you look at it." There are several universities, a couple of RL companies, and a number of individual SL members currently using this platform for non-game projects, including training, research, and project planning and development.

I know all that, Kim, and I've heard it a thousand times, but the point stands: they have a subsidized project. LL didn't do a thing to create opportunities for OTHER projects to come into being. They had only ONE applicant? For a free sim? Huh? I think maybe run the ad a few times more??

And I disagree that it is "postmodern" -- it's quaint and kitsch. It's a matter of taste, I guess. It's amazing to me why people get so defensive of Newoldenberg. It was meant to be a showcase of social democracy, but evidently, as Trotsky said, you can only have socialism in one country? The Lindens discontinued this program partly under the barrage of criticism about favouritism. It would have been better if they had allowed more contests and more competition and worked at promoting the idea so that socialism wouldn't be the only thing we'd have to show for subsidies : ) It's proven to be a bastion from which all kinds of campaigns are launched, ie. to end bulk discount for land purchases and the 10 percent grouped land bonus.

It is a game no matter how you look at it. It may have more real life morale and purpose then any other, but its still a game. I understand that people use this as their primary source of income and research, but its still a game.