A Starting Point: Two Needs - One Solution?

I thought I'd kick off some discussion with two needs I've seen surface in the many threads on groups & covenants in the forums:

1. (Individual Covenant) The need for buisness owners, organizations, and foundations to be able to delegate land permissions and accept tier donations without the risk of the land being sold without the permission of the founder.

Detail: Originally, groups appear to have been created with a "One size fits all" mindset. As residents have created increasingly unique buisness ventures, organizations and foundations, a single template for group structure is no longer sufficient.

Some have proposed either multiple group types, or an ala carte system of selections that would allow residents to tailor their group to fit their specific needs.


2. (Collective Covenant) The need for residents to band together to create zoning covenants in their area that remain persistant after individual parcels change hands.

Detail: Today, if residents wish to band together and create a residential area, such as Blumfield - there is no way for residents to enforce mutually agreed upon zoning standards.

The 'covenant' model has been discussed as a way to apply standards that remain persistant on land parcels even after the land has been sold.

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My questions:

Can both of the above needs be accomodated through changes to the way groups are structured, and how?

Are the needs of individuals and collectives the same at the end of the day, or fundimentally different?

How can we come up with a system with more pros & few cons to solve these challenges?

Discuss

My answer is no; but I can't comprehend how covenants will be enforcable. When I understand what convenant proponents are hoping to implement, my answer may change to yes.

They are the same. What I mean is that if we strive to accomodate comprehensive individual needs in as flexible a fashion as possible, we will have inherently provided for collective needs. In other words, a system that meets individual needs within a collective, then treats the collective as an individual when necessary, works for all situations. It just takes listing all the conceivable individual needs and normalizing them into a programmable structure.

We must, absolutely must, avoid trying to code elements of the process that cannot be reasonably automated. Covenants (agreements) require human intervention at some point, especially in an online community fraught with anonymity. If this point isn't agreed among the planners, we'll end up with a system that is either too restrictive, such as the current method of group land deeding, or too lax in the sense that there will be no way to actual enforce covenants' requirements and restrictions.

Earned trust is vital to a covenant. The most dangerous thing we can do is put forth an automated system that seemingly guarantees agreements between online personae that don't know each other from Rasalon. The Second Life population will be far better served when we comprehensively rewrite access and use permissions for applicable elements of the world and couple the release with the launch of an educational campaign that focuses on the pros and cons of working with anonymous people in an online environment.

Hi Khamon, you say you're not sure what the covenanters are after, I'll explain my take on it and see if that helps - although others may have different ideas.

Looking at the groups I'm in and/or recently left due to size limits I've got:

Three basiclly land ownership groups
Two help/mentoring groups as a helper, (one as a requester of help left to join the groups discussion group)
Five basically in SL work groups
Two primarily discussion groups (and a few others I've been in)
One primarly event based group (two left recently) which also owns a bit of land
The groups group
One social group (one left recently)

As you're well aware they're crammed into a 'one size fits all' tag under groups.

If we look outside SL for a moment, I'm in a union, work with/for 3 groups of people (some employed some self-employed) I'm in a couple of email newsgroups, I have a batch of friends I go and do RL things with occasionally, and I've been in other groups over the years for other things. Some of these are informal, some are very, very formal, but they all have at least slightly different structures - the people I go to the movies with is a very different structure to the group than my relationship with my main employer.

In SL that currently isn't the situation, but my suggestion is that something that moves that way (fully or partially) should be implemented. The needs of a land ownership group are different to a work group are different to a social group etc. The needs of different systems of land ownership groups are also different, as are the needs of the different work groups I'm in.

A system that says here are the options (and with steps to make it as easy and clear as possible for quick set up as well as ideally a power-user fully customisable setting) and that also makes it available for potential members to read and understand if applicable - just as my different RL groups have different sets-up for different uses - would be a big, big step forward IMO. Covenant is the word I'd use through choice, although that might be transatlantic issue, we'd call it a constitution over here for anything that looks like an SL group atm, and articles of memorandum for a company, but that's just differences in terminology.

Oh oh OH oh oh okay I get it. Thanks Eloise.

I was thinking that convenant meant imposing contractual regulations on people who owned land outright. But it actually means the flexibility to assign land management permissions within a flexible grouping structure.

That clarifies a lot of points for me. I appreciate you taking the time to expound.

What you are describing, looks more like a flexible system of applying permissions, conducting votes and handling ownership issues, like I tried to outline it in my suggestion or like Tiger suggested with another focus.

I allways thought a "covenant" meant something else/something more: an agreement which every group member kind of "signs" when he or she enters the group. Such an agreement could contain zoning rules for example or some rules on handling other common property of the group. It is hard for me to envision any effective system for enforcing more than some very simple rules without human intervention, though. But at least making the acceptance of such a covenant part of joining the group would be an act of agreeing to it without any backdoors ("Nobody ever gave me that damned notecard ..."

A Covenant further could describe what process would have to be obeyed when expelling members. This at least could be supported in the system. Currently there are only two kinds of processes: uncontrolled expelling of a non-officer by an officer or a clumsy system for voting an officer out of office ...

I am not sure, if this was meant when the Lindens mentioned a "Covenant", though. It is just my understanding - which might stem from my background.

If I understand it correctly, the Lindens said that an overhaul of the permissions system would be first, any support for a covenant would come much later.

I normally think of a covenant more as Kharmon apparently did, and Pharm does - but the dictionary says it's any legal agreement - and specifically includes structures and constitutions. you learn something every day!

And yes, the idea is similar to yours and Tiger's and mine and several other people's as I've expounded it. I was hoping to illustrate the more unusual use of the term and what I meant by it - although that might be different to precisely what the Linden's mean I guess we'll have to see!