Local Government Study Group - Recently Updated Pages

Transcript of Meeting May 6, 2007

davidorban — Sun, 13 May 2007 01:35:32 CDT

Davidorban Agnon: I would like to welcome the Local Government Study Group on Vulcano!
Davidorban Agnon: We are now starting the meeting
Davidorban Agnon: Please everybody take your seats (or not)
Davidorban Agnon: except the last rows as those need loudspeakers which we are not using today
Davidorban Agnon: As Ashcroft, founder of LGSG
Davidorban Agnon: asked if it was possible to host the meeting of the group here
Davidorban Agnon: I immediately and gladly said yes, as Vulcano
Davidorban Agnon: is itself an experiment in community building,
Davidorban Agnon: , and experimentation.
Davidorban Agnon: The future of online worlds will depend on their
Davidorban Agnon: ability to show unique value to those inhabiting
Davidorban Agnon: them, and the work of groups like LGSG is very
Davidorban Agnon: important in shaping the evolutionary paths that
Davidorban Agnon: are going to be taken.
Davidorban Agnon: Thank you again for coming here!
Davidorban Agnon: Ashcroft, you have the floor. :)
Ashcroft Burnham: Thank you very much, David :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: Before we start the substantive part of the meeting...
Ashcroft Burnham: ...I need to get off this box, hold on a moment.
Ashcroft Burnham: That's better.
Ashcroft Burnham: As I was saying...
Ashcroft Burnham: ...before we start the substantive part of this meeting...
Ashcroft Burnham: ...I'd like to extend my thanks to Davidorban Aragon for very kindly hosting this meeting of the Local Government Study Group in his excellent auditorium here on Volcano.
Ashcroft Burnham: A big round of applause, everybody, for Davidorban :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Davidorban Agnon: Thanks! :) VUlcano welcomes you all
Ashcroft Burnham: (It's :-D everybody...)
Dreamingen Writer: /applause
Ashcroft Burnham: "/clap"
Mondrian Lykin: /clap
Ashcroft Burnham: Anyway, thank you all very much for coming this Mayday bank holiday week-end...
Ashcroft Burnham: ...I hope that I'm not disturbing too many of your holiday plans :-)
Soul4sale Ferraris: (we don't get one of those in the States :-(
Ashcroft Burnham: To-day, we're discussing the second draft tools proposals for the Local Government Study Group.
Mondrian Lykin puts down the surf board
Dreamingen Writer: re you from the states?
Ashcroft Burnham: A brief reminder for those who aren't familliar, the Local Government Study Group is a group to make proposals for governance tools to be implemented in SecondLife, and try to persuade Linden Lab to implement them.
Astrophysicist McCallister: Sorry, still rezzin
Ashcroft Burnham: We have so far produiced two drafts of the tools proposals, and I'm hoping that we'll make a third sometime soon.
Ashcroft Burnham: At the last meeting, we were very lucky to be joined by Robin Linden, who seemed interested in our project.
Ashcroft Burnham: The format of the discussion to-day is that we'll go through the comments on the tools proposals that people have sent in in advance, then go onto any further comments that anybody here has.
Ashcroft Burnham: Before we do that, though, can everybody touch the flipchart to get an agenda, the tools proposals, and the various comments? :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: I'll give you all a minute or so to do that...
Ashcroft Burnham: BRB
Davidorban Agnon: (There have been last minute changes
Davidorban Agnon: even if you had a previous version, please take it again)
Ashcroft Burnham: Right, I hope that you all have the paperwork that you need now :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: We'll now move onto the first set of comments by Pelanor Eldrich.
Davidorban Agnon: Thank you Ashcroft
Davidorban Agnon: I see that Pelanor has not been able to attend in person this evening
Ashcroft Burnham: Unfortunately, Pelanor can't be with us to-day, but he has left his tools ideas for us to discuss :-)
Davidorban Agnon: Is there somebody that would like to start commenting the suggestions?
Ashcroft Burnham: I'll hand you back over to Davidorban, who will chair the discussion on Pelanor's ideas. I'll say a few words on my thoughts on the matter in a moment.
Ashcroft Burnham: Over to you, Davidorban :-)
Davidorban Agnon: Ok
Davidorban Agnon: Thanks Ash for the introduction
Davidorban Agnon: Please all take a reading of Pelanor's
Davidorban Agnon: notes if you haven't already done so
Davidorban Agnon: as you see they deal with the trustworthiness
Davidorban Agnon: of the transaction datasets and digitally signed transactions for vcommerce in SL
Davidorban Agnon: If you would like to start commenting, please stand up, and I will call you by name on stage
Davidorban Agnon: Ash, you and I are never shy
Ashcroft Burnham: For the third draft of the LGSG tools proposals, I plan to split the tools into different sections, with Pelanor's suggestions in the "ancillary" section :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: There may be some refinements in detail needed (I'm not fully sure exactly what no. 2 means), but the overall idea, I think is good, and so, it seems, does everyone else :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: And welcome back Davidorban :-)
Mondrian Lykin: if I might, I think they're a little more than ancillary, in many senses they're necessary
Davidorban Agnon: thanks
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Davidorban Agnon: I haven't had the chance to hear
Ashcroft Burnham: Davidorban will now introduce the next commentor's comments, and then Kirsty herself, who is here, can say some words about them, too :-)
Davidorban Agnon: the comments unfortunately
Davidorban Agnon: but Ash,
Davidorban Agnon: if you don't mind
Davidorban Agnon: I would like to say two words
Davidorban Agnon: is that ok?
Davidorban Agnon: about Pelanor's ideas
Ashcroft Burnham: Ahh, about Pelanor Eldrich's tools? Yes, go ahead :-)
Davidorban Agnon: thanks
Davidorban Agnon: The issue of dependable datasets is very important of course
Davidorban Agnon: and as long as we are talking about a single grid
Davidorban Agnon: run all by LL it ties into the entire issue of LL being trustworthy itself or not
Davidorban Agnon: there have been issues of sever inventory loss
Davidorban Agnon: where the standard reply from LL of reading the TOS
Davidorban Agnon: since all residents are here at their own risk
Davidorban Agnon: didn't feel very enlightened
Davidorban Agnon: that is why being able to acccess the datasets
Davidorban Agnon: is also important in my opinion
Davidorban Agnon: but LL won't accept the liability going with it
Davidorban Agnon: since they do not have the capacity of running a lossless grid
Davidorban Agnon: and they would not be able to recover from all mistakes
Davidorban Agnon: that is why it is more important to document accurately
Davidorban Agnon: those elements
Davidorban Agnon: where the documentation can be the basis of a recovery
Davidorban Agnon: based on a good faith action by the part of a vendor
Davidorban Agnon: towards a customers
Davidorban Agnon: lost purchase
Davidorban Agnon: .
Davidorban Agnon: I hope this makes at least a little sense with respect to the previous comments!
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Ashcroft Burnham: Thank you Davidorban :-)
Davidorban Agnon: would you like to come on stage
Davidorban Agnon: Now Kristy,
Davidorban Agnon: and illustrate your proposals
Davidorban Agnon: ?
Davidorban Agnon: Thanks!
Davidorban Agnon: Please welcome Kristy!
Davidorban Agnon: :D
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Kristy Laval: so. i'd like to comments on the two of my documents
Kristy Laval: starting with the one that you received earlier
Kristy Laval: the second was only sent to ash late today. so my appologies if you have not read it (it is in the flipchart anyway, please grab it)
Kristy Laval: so.
Kristy Laval: not entering in to every of my notes. i thing an important topic in the second roposal is the ability to have several level of governements
Kristy Laval: + we should also think of homeless residents
Kristy Laval: as this is majort difference between sl/rl
Kristy Laval: here in sl, being homeless is not as a probleme as in rl. but being homless should not mean that sl residents have no governement to protect them
Kristy Laval: therefore, that is one of my points. the governance tools should also take into account those homeless sl residents
Kristy Laval: another comment on the second draft is that the governement should not be put in place of changing witjout notice the tax level that it wants to collect
Kristy Laval: as for the rest of my comments on the not. i welcome your questions but i waont enter here into details of each
Kristy Laval: as for my second paper
Davidorban Agnon: Thank you Kristy!
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Davidorban Agnon: Please go ahead with your other comments
Davidorban Agnon: on the second paper
Ashcroft Burnham: Can we have comments on the first before we move to the second? There's a lot to take in on the first :-
Ashcroft Burnham: :-)
Davidorban Agnon: Ye Ash
Davidorban Agnon: let's do it like this
Davidorban Agnon: do you agree Kristy?
Kristy Laval: this paper describes my view on tools that should be built using what we currently have at hand in SL
Kristy Laval: ok. go on
Kristy Laval listens
Davidorban Agnon: Let's take comments and questions now on your first set
Davidorban Agnon: So let's do it differently now
Davidorban Agnon: no need to stand up
Davidorban Agnon: just ask your question
Davidorban Agnon: or say your comment in the public chat line
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Mondrian Lykin: may I?
Davidorban Agnon: Please!
Mondrian Lykin: ok
Mondrian Lykin: I agree on the need of establishing which kind of government is one linked to, especially when it comes to disputes
Mondrian Lykin: but on the other hand, there willl always be an amount of people who are not linked to any government because as we said, this is all on a volountary basis
Mondrian Lykin: so I think we should find another way to "link" people to government, if they don't chose one themselves
Mondrian Lykin: so yes, people can chose gov't even if not linked by owning land in a specific region
Mondrian Lykin: but if they don't, how would we solve this? I am adding on Kristy's 1st point
Ashcroft Burnham: May I say a word about landless residents, government, citizens, non-citizens, and powers? :-)
Mondrian Lykin: please :P
Davidorban Agnon: Yes, Ash
Davidorban Agnon: Thanks for your comments Mondrian
Mondrian Lykin: :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: Kirsty raises an important point; that is that governments, in order to be useful, have to be able to deal with all Sl residents, not just those who own land.
Ashcroft Burnham: There are two sorts of ways in which a government can deal with that under the tools that I propose.
Ashcroft Burnham: Firstly, there is the notion of the liquid escrow.
Ashcroft Burnham: Under that model, a person could become a citizen of a government by depositing with that government a sum of money in Linden dollars as an escrow, which the government could forfeit as an enforcement measure.
Ashcroft Burnham: However, to make the forfieture of the sum a meaningful penalty, the person in question should be able to *use* the deposited amount whilst it is deposited.
Ashcroft Burnham: I won't go into all the technicalities, but that actually works out as the exact functional equivalent of just giving the government the power to take away L$x (where x is the amount of the escrow, which can be configured) at its discretion.
Ashcroft Burnham: That is an alternative to the land escrow system, whereby a person who owns land can become a citizen of a government by putting her or his land under the control of a government, which could, in certain configurations of government, ultimately forfiet that land.
Ashcroft Burnham: Those two forms of escrow forfieture are examples of enforcement against citizens.
Ashcroft Burnham: However, governments also need to have some (albeit more limited) enforcement powers against non-citizens: after all, real-world governments can enforce their laws against foreigners as well as natives :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: Two possibilities arise.
Ashcroft Burnham: Firstly, a citizen of government X could be sanctioned by government X for breaking a law/rule/norm of government Y, in pursuance of an agreement between government X and Y that they will enforce each others' norms.
Ashcroft Burnham: So, the escrow forfieture enforcement powers could be used against non-citizens in those circumstnaces.
Ashcroft Burnham: For people who are not citizens of *any* government, or any government with an agreement, there is the simple remedy of banishment, which is an enforcement measure against all persons :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: Banishment can be made more effective by being reciprocated through multiple governments.
Ashcroft Burnham: That's how the tools as designed deal with the landless and non-citizens :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: And I think that it's time for some other people's comments now... :-)
Davidorban Agnon: Thank Ash
Ashcroft Burnham: BRB
Davidorban Agnon: Other comments from the audience?
Davidorban Agnon: Just a little one from me..
Davidorban Agnon: it is interesting to note how technical the issues that Ash raises are
Davidorban Agnon: and that it will be very important to find the language
Davidorban Agnon: that talks to all residents
Mondrian Lykin: what do you mean by "language"?
Davidorban Agnon: including those 99% and more who don't participate actively in the government
Davidorban Agnon: Kristy, please
Davidorban Agnon: do you want to reply to Ash as well?
Kristy Laval: ash. thank you for clarifying
Kristy Laval: and indeed escrow is probably the good way to make enforcement to non-land owners
Kristy Laval: my was was also (if not mainly) that gov are not only ment to make enforcement against citizens,
Kristy Laval: but should also defend them when it is needed
Kristy Laval: lets take an obvious example
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Kristy Laval: say all governements are elected and defent land owners
Kristy Laval: there might have a bias to favour land owners overs non-land owners
Kristy Laval: if non-land owner do not have the opportunity to pick a governament to defend them. there will be no gov X sttling woth gov Y in cases
Kristy Laval: a land-owner is inconflict with a non-land owner.
Kristy Laval: thus, my coment that the tools to be created should be able to take care of those residents
Davidorban Agnon: Thanks for this reply
Bru Yang: ehm.... question
Davidorban Agnon: Please Bru!
Bru Yang: I'm sorry if it sounds quite provocative but...
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Davidorban Agnon: No problem
Bru Yang: 1) Why would I want to be part of a government?
Davidorban Agnon: Ash, Kristy?
Davidorban Agnon: Who wants to take that?
Ashcroft Burnham: Ahh, Bru, that sort of issue was dealt with comprehensively at the last two meetings :-) This is a meeting to discuss the details of the tools...
Davidorban Agnon: (I have my own views too)
Bru Yang: oh sorry
Davidorban Agnon: Do you mind to give Bru just a short answer?
Davidorban Agnon: there's got to be one
Bru Yang: ok, I'll look for minutes of the previous
Mondrian Lykin: Bru: http://lgsg.wetpaint.com
Ashcroft Burnham: (See http://lgsg.wetpaint.com for more information on the last two meetings, including transcripts. Also have a look at "Benefits of governments in virutal worlds" linked on that page) :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: (The short answer is to refer to that document :-) )
Davidorban Agnon: (not valid)
Bru Yang: fabulous: just in case it hasn't been touched as a topic previously....
Ashcroft Burnham: :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: What's not valid, Davidorban - the link?
Davidorban Agnon: Bru, you have a question no 2 as well=
Bru Yang: 2) What if I'm a homeless / independent (not part of any government) ? I shouldn't be disadvataged
Davidorban Agnon: ?
Davidorban Agnon: Ash, your short answer :)
Ashcroft Burnham: (Sorry everyone: lag. Oops...
Ashcroft Burnham: )
Ashcroft Burnham: There's a sense in which those two questions conflict, Bru :-)
Davidorban Agnon: Ash, Kristy? Do you want to answer Bru's second question?
Ashcroft Burnham: On the one hand, you're asking, "what are the advantages of bieng in a governent?"; and on the other, you're asking, "why should there be disadvantages of not being in a government?" :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: I think that Kirsty wants to say something on this topic, too :-)
Bru Yang: :)
Ashcroft Burnham: So, I'll sit down, lag allowing...
Kristy Laval: i think people should be free
Kristy Laval: actually, they are quite free in sl
Kristy Laval: and if anyone would not think any kind of gov could help him in SL. they should not be forced to pick one
Kristy Laval: so if people are indeed disadvantaged by having no gov. that would be their choice
Kristy Laval: so, to me that is not a problem. nobody can help people against their will.
Davidorban Agnon: Bru
Ashcroft Burnham: Well said :-)
Davidorban Agnon: I think that it is a simple question of definition
Dreamingen Writer: May I ask a question?
Bru Yang: right, I'm just worried if we're going to propose tools that are going to create a divide among people who are part of an institution and people who want to stay out of it
Davidorban Agnon: the entity that helps residents is what we call government
Davidorban Agnon: Yes Bru
Davidorban Agnon: you are right
Davidorban Agnon: so much so that previous
Davidorban Agnon: meetings of LGSG
Davidorban Agnon: were disrupted
Davidorban Agnon: by anarchists who
Davidorban Agnon: don't even want to let people think about these
Davidorban Agnon: developments
Bru Yang: I see
Davidorban Agnon: !
Ashcroft Burnham: (We have proper security now :-) )
Davidorban Agnon: (so much for the freedom of others!)
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Davidorban Agnon: But just a little provocative note
Davidorban Agnon: from my own view
Davidorban Agnon: which is almost always evolutionary
Davidorban Agnon: I want multiple governments to compete
Davidorban Agnon: to be able and 'defend' my interests
Davidorban Agnon: and I want to be able and play them off against each other
Davidorban Agnon: that is the evolutionary pressure
Davidorban Agnon: whcih SL has as an advantage against RL
Davidorban Agnon: we have a totally frictionless base
Davidorban Agnon: for citizenship
Davidorban Agnon: with potentially zero lock in.
Davidorban Agnon: We have one last question
Davidorban Agnon: and then we will go to the second paper by Kristy
Davidorban Agnon: Dream
Davidorban Agnon: you wanted to ask something
Dreamingen Writer: I wanted to know if there is a process for forgiveness?
Davidorban Agnon: Ash?
Dreamingen Writer: I do not want to get off topic
Ashcroft Burnham: I shan't stand up, since it'll take me five minutes to sit down again with the lag :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: However, to answer Dream's question, the tools are designed to be as flexible as possible.
Dreamingen Writer: thank you
Ashcroft Burnham: If a particular government decided to build forgiveness into its structures and norms, it would be perfectly free to do so :-)
Theater Chair: llStopAnimation: Script trying to stop animations but agent not found
Bru hairdo halo v2: All Go
Ashcroft Burnham: Have a look at the tools proopsals, Dream, and see for yourself how flexible that they are :-)
Davidorban Agnon: Kristy
Kristy Laval: yes
Davidorban Agnon: please go ahead with your second paper
Kristy Laval: thanks david
Kristy Laval: my second paper is not much about what tool we need to be put in place by linden, but is rather
Kristy Laval: about what we should do in the mean time
Kristy Laval: as slightly off-topic (but not much), i will try to be brief
Kristy Laval: one tool that is at the moment thought of in order to provide some power to decision taken is a grid wide ban list
Kristy Laval: which is something minimalist but which has theh advantage of being somehow feasible without LL
Kristy Laval: my point of view, is rather close to david's when he says gov needs to compete inSL
Kristy Laval: in order to take "market shares"
Kristy Laval: and i think even for simplistic tools such as grid wide ban list, we should have that in mind too
Kristy Laval: my document describes what I think is one way to introduce some sort of competition between multiple gov into baning lists
Kristy Laval: and also taking into account the scaling population and comunities present in SL
Lisandra Beck: hi, may I?
Kristy Laval: I do feel that taking into account teh growth of the population, as well as the diversity of the complains
Kristy Laval: will be hardly manageable though a signgle ban list
Kristy Laval: so, if you share my interest, i invite you to read my paper (trusted web of decision bodies) and send me your comments
Kristy Laval: thank you
Alphonsine Lemmon: Thank you for the explanation, sorry to side track a bit.
Davidorban Agnon: Very good!
Davidorban Agnon: Thanks Kristy
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Davidorban Agnon: :D
Davidorban Agnon: I now suggest, unless there are specific questions about this second one as well
Davidorban Agnon: that we move to the next point
Davidorban Agnon: So please let's have anonymous come to the podium and speak!
Davidorban Agnon: Ash
Davidorban Agnon: ?
Davidorban Agnon: Why didn't anonymous come?
Ashcroft Burnham: LOL!
Ashcroft Burnham: Hold on, let me change the slide...
Davidorban Agnon: He never shows Up
Davidorban Agnon: We should ban him from the group!
Davidorban Agnon: Maybe with a grid-wide trusted thingy
Davidorban Agnon: huh?
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Davidorban Agnon: (that was a joke to spice things up alittle, thank you)
Ashcroft Burnham: Thank you, Kirsty :-) There are a lot of detailed ideas there, and, although it hasn't been possible to look at them all in detail to-day, it was worthwhile having them aired for public comment.
Ashcroft Burnham: And thank you, David, for the wit ;-)
Ashcroft Burnham: Now, no. 4, anonymous.
Ashcroft Burnham: Obviously, anonymous isn't here...
Ashcroft Burnham: Actually, it's sort of my fault that he/she doesn't have a name: I forgot who sent me the notecard when I was compliing this.
Ashcroft Burnham: I think that it might have been James Seraph.
Ashcroft Burnham: Anyway, I'll hand back over to David to field questions or comments on Anonymous's ideas :-)
Davidorban Agnon: oops
Davidorban Agnon: that was quick
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Davidorban Agnon: So please, if you had the chance to read this proposal/comment
Davidorban Agnon: this is the right time to add your views
Davidorban Agnon: or ask questions about them
Davidorban Agnon: of course
Davidorban Agnon: it will be more of a conversation about it
Davidorban Agnon: since we won't have the author replying
Davidorban Agnon: at least today
Davidorban Agnon: Let's give a minute to everybody to look at the document
Ashcroft Burnham: BRB
Davidorban Agnon: Ok
Davidorban Agnon: Comments?
Davidorban Agnon: QUestions?
Davidorban Agnon: Additions to the anonymous note?
Davidorban Agnon: Let me add my view then
Davidorban Agnon: since some of the issues here are of nomenclature and definitions
Davidorban Agnon: I think that they are on topic
Davidorban Agnon: It is unlikely that we will be able and cover
Davidorban Agnon: all our needs for signifiers
Davidorban Agnon: with existing words
Davidorban Agnon: we will have definitions whose proper single word identification
Davidorban Agnon: must be a neologism
Davidorban Agnon: I would be worried if it were not so
Davidorban Agnon: since that would mean that the patform for politics
Davidorban Agnon: and policies is not fertile enough
Davidorban Agnon: since all the existing words suffice to describe the phenomena
Davidorban Agnon: within.
Davidorban Agnon: I am sure that this is not so
Davidorban Agnon: and we should hurry up and adopt new words as quickly as we can
Davidorban Agnon: to open the creativity as well to bring new meaning to what we do.
Davidorban Agnon: The best, and rather appropriate source for this of course is SF
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Ashcroft Burnham: SourceForge?
Davidorban Agnon: Other remarks or comments?
Davidorban Agnon: Ash: Science Fiction
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Ashcroft Burnham: Ahh :-)
Davidorban Agnon: Bru? More provocative question?
Davidorban Agnon: s
Ashcroft Burnham: I have a brief comment on Anonymous's comments, but I'll go after everybody else...
Dreamingen Writer: for those not wanted to be invovled in a form of state, is there a bill or rights for them?
Ashcroft Burnham: Shall I answer that?
Davidorban Agnon: Ash, yes please
Ashcroft Burnham: Dream, bills of rights and other legal documents can only exist (and have any force) within the structure of a state of some sort.
Ashcroft Burnham: If there was no state (or some sort of government or metagovernment) attached to the bill of rights, who would enforce it? Who would adjudicate on it? How would it be decided what to put in it in the first place? :-)
Dreamingen Writer: i see said the blind man as he took out his hammer and saw
Ashcroft Burnham: :-)
Davidorban Agnon: Thanks for your question Dream
Davidorban Agnon: Ash, to you then.
Davidorban Agnon: other questions, or comments on the last paper?
Ashcroft Burnham: It seems not...
Ashcroft Burnham: My response to Anonymous's comments is rather brief :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: With the first two, I agree (althoguh I'd be very interested to see what neologisms that Davidorban can come up with :-) )
Ashcroft Burnham: For the third, I think that the voting (and general perameters as to who can reply "no" to a ping) should be configurable :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: And now onto no. 5 :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: Any other tool ideas.
Davidorban Agnon: Well,
Ashcroft Burnham: Please note that this is not the point at which to make miscellaeous comments about the existing tool ideas: that is what item no. 6 is about :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: Item no. 5 is for anybody here who has any *extra* tool ideas that they think would be good to go onto the list for the third draft.
Davidorban Agnon: Ash, do we have tools about prim allocation?
Ashcroft Burnham: I'll had back to Davidorban to field suggestions :-)
Davidorban Agnon: If not I would not mind telling LGSG about what we are playing with here in VUlcano
Davidorban Agnon: hi Malachi, please have a seat in the audience
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Ashcroft Burnham: Let's see if there are questions first :-)
Malachi Mulligan: ok david
Ashcroft Burnham: Anybody? Any other tool ideas? :-)
Bru Yang: no, prim allocation is my priority too :D
Davidorban Agnon: Yes, Ash, mine was a new tool idea! :)
Ashcroft Burnham: Go on, then :-)
Davidorban Agnon: ok
Davidorban Agnon: Vulcano is an island
Davidorban Agnon: where as the residents know
Davidorban Agnon: and I mean just any SL resident who comes by
Davidorban Agnon: and chats with others already here
Davidorban Agnon: ,
Davidorban Agnon: anybody can build
Davidorban Agnon: there are no restrictions in place
Davidorban Agnon: for where
Davidorban Agnon: how much
Davidorban Agnon: with or without scripts
Davidorban Agnon: etc
Davidorban Agnon: the single rather generic indication is
Davidorban Agnon: use your best judgement
Davidorban Agnon: and common sense
Davidorban Agnon: .
Davidorban Agnon: This leads of course to a lot of chatter
Davidorban Agnon: and a quick filling up of the prim limits
Davidorban Agnon: on the sim
Davidorban Agnon: what we are trying to find
Davidorban Agnon: is a new set of dynamic resource allocation algorithms
Davidorban Agnon: that would be configurable by the state
Davidorban Agnon: and would shape how a memebr would be able to use the resources
Davidorban Agnon: let me give you an example
Davidorban Agnon: we want newcomers to feel welcome
Davidorban Agnon: so we let them build
Davidorban Agnon: but of course the unexperienced will build a lot of wooden cubes
Davidorban Agnon: or even worse
Davidorban Agnon: litter the landscape with pink flamigoes
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Davidorban Agnon: what we are discussing actively about here
Davidorban Agnon: is autonomous robots
Davidorban Agnon: that identify the creators of objects
Davidorban Agnon: and talk to them
Davidorban Agnon: to educate them
Davidorban Agnon: and maintain a positive direction in the evolution of the spirit of the land
Davidorban Agnon: the way these would be implemented are parametric
Davidorban Agnon: and could be adapted to different needs
Davidorban Agnon: of different governments/states
Davidorban Agnon: robots that act without talking in more authoritarian ones
Davidorban Agnon: time limits
Davidorban Agnon: etc.
Davidorban Agnon: there are a lot of variables to consider
Davidorban Agnon: dialog
Davidorban Agnon: and this would become potentially a new tab in the about land
Davidorban Agnon: .
Davidorban Agnon: over.
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Bru Yang: just one addition
Ashcroft Burnham: Thank you very much, David :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: Please put that in notecard form so that I can add it to the draft no. 3 :-)
Davidorban Agnon: Ok
Davidorban Agnon: Other suggestions for new tools of government?
Ashcroft Burnham: Anyone...?
Davidorban Agnon: Ok
Davidorban Agnon: Let's move on to 6
Davidorban Agnon: Dream?
Dreamingen Writer: no it is okay
Dreamingen Writer: thank you
Davidorban Agnon: it looked you were about to say something! :)
Davidorban Agnon: ok
Davidorban Agnon: then comments on existing tools
Ashcroft Burnham: Any miscellaneous comments, anyone?
Ashcroft Burnham: If you've been bursting to say something about the tools for the whole meeting, but haven't found a convenient spot in the conversation, now's the time :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: Well, it seems that the tools were more uncontroversial than we thought ;-)
Ashcroft Burnham: While you're all thinking of things to say, can I just let you all know about another project that you might all be interested in.
Ashcroft Burnham: Some of you know about it already, and are involved in it.
Ashcroft Burnham: Kristy alluded to it earlier :-)
Davidorban Agnon: Yes, Ash, please do
Ashcroft Burnham: It's called the Justice List, and it's a project to created a distributed banishment list based on the judgments of a court, backed with a democratically elected Parliament.
Ashcroft Burnham: Kirsty's idea is to make the technical aspect of the system allow for multiple distributed ban lists, but we're starting with the one for now, and we can see whether there is interest to take it further :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: If anybody's interested in helping to manage, administer or design aspects of the system, do IM me :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: Now, does anybody have anything miscellaneous to say?
Ashcroft Burnham: (I think, alas, that we're clashing with a Thinkers meeting about account verification, which might explain the slightly lower turnout than usual...)
Dreamingen Writer: Is banning the only tool we have?
Ashcroft Burnham: It's all that we have at present, which is why the LGSG exists: to persuade LL to create more :-)
Dreamingen Writer: there is no form of rehabilitation?
Ashcroft Burnham: Well, now, we can't have a software tool for rehabilitation, lovely as it'd be to have a "rehabilitate" option on each avatar's pie menu :-)
Dreamingen Writer: haha
Dreamingen Writer: thank you
Ashcroft Burnham: Individual governments would be free to set up their own rehabilitaiton schemes, of course.
Dreamingen Writer: right
Ashcroft Burnham: But, of course, rehabilitation can only work for somebody who's willing to be rehabilitated. A coercive option is still needed :-)
Dreamingen Writer: i c
Davidorban Agnon: Thanks Dream
Davidorban Agnon: and Ash for your answers
Ashcroft Burnham: You're very welcome :-)
Dreamingen Writer: thank you
Ashcroft Burnham: I should say, if anybody here is not already a memeber of the Local Government Study Group, but is interested in discussing local government further, then do join :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: It's open enrolment, and membership is free :_)
Ashcroft Burnham: You'll get notices of forthcoming meetings...
Dreamingen Writer: who will settle disputes between states?
Mondrian Lykin: George W. Bush
Mondrian Lykin: lol
Ashcroft Burnham: The answer depends on what kinds of disputes that there are :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: For example, the tools that I have posited include the possibility of having federal systems.
Ashcroft Burnham: So, between two states of a federation, a federal authority would adjudicate.
Ashcroft Burnham: In other cases, it'd be down to diplomats :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: There's nothing stopping people, of course, creating a United Virtual Nations, or something similar :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: That'd be a very good development if it happened.
Dreamingen Writer: right that is where I was going
Davidorban Agnon: One issue
Davidorban Agnon: that I think we have to keep in mind
Ashcroft Burnham: I'm not sure that that idea can be built into the tools specifically, though, unless you have an idea?
Davidorban Agnon: at all stages of preparation
Davidorban Agnon: is that there will be multiple grids
Davidorban Agnon: and that they will interoperate
Dreamingen Writer: unless it reserves some power for a SLUN?
Ashcroft Burnham: Ahh, yes, I notice that we have a beta tester for open SecondLife wmongst us to-day... :-)
Davidorban Agnon: so there will be the need of many other structures
Davidorban Agnon: and interfaces
Ashcroft Burnham: Hmm, or at least, we did earlier on :-)
Davidorban Agnon: with new roles
Davidorban Agnon: You mean Opensource?
Davidorban Agnon: He is running his own Server!
Ashcroft Burnham: Yes :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: Yes, I saw the screenshot.
Ashcroft Burnham: Very impressive :-)
Davidorban Agnon: So I am sure that the need of further degrees of political innovation is right there...
Ashcroft Burnham: David - do you have any ideas about what, if any, tools would be needed to manage that?
Dreamingen Writer: thank you, I must leave
Dreamingen Writer takes a humble bow
Davidorban Agnon: thanks for your active participation Dream
Ashcroft Burnham: Thank you, Dream, for your contribution :-)
Davidorban Agnon: see you next time
Davidorban Agnon: and welcome to Vulcano
Ashcroft Burnham: Well, it seems like everybody likes the tools the way that they are, more or less :-)
Davidorban Agnon: Heh
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Ashcroft Burnham: Thank you everybody for coming along, and for contributing your ideas :-)
Davidorban Agnon: We don't have Prokofy
Davidorban Agnon: othewise there would have been more dissent!
Davidorban Agnon: Right?
Ashcroft Burnham: LOL! He'd express dissent at anything ;-)
Davidorban Agnon: :)
Ashcroft Burnham: If you want somebody to disagree with any reasonable idea, Prokofy's your man! ;-)
Davidorban Agnon: Thank you very much for attending today's meeting
Ashcroft Burnham: Anyway, that aside...
Davidorban Agnon: and thanks to LGSG for choosing Vulcano as a venuw
Davidorban Agnon: e
Davidorban Agnon: You are welcome to stand up
Davidorban Agnon: and stay here
Davidorban Agnon: or just outside
Davidorban Agnon: at the shade of our red oak
Ashcroft Burnham: Thank you very much, David, for hosting the meeting, and providing us with such a fine venue :-)
Davidorban Agnon: for an informal chat
Davidorban Agnon: and of course
Ashcroft Burnham: A round of applause, everybody, for David :-)
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Ashcroft Burnham: :-D
Davidorban Agnon: please do visit Vulcano before you leave
Davidorban Agnon: :D
Ashcroft Burnham: Transcripts will be posted to the Wiki shortly.
Davidorban Agnon: Thanks Ash!

Home

mondrianlykin — Fri, 11 May 2007 12:30:32 CDT

Introduction

The Local Government Study Group is a group in the virtual world Second Life dedicated to the promotion of tools to facilitate local governance by those who inhabit that virtual world.

The Group aims to discuss the benefits of local governance, and to develop and refine detailed proposals for sophisticated governance tools to put before Second Life developers Linden Lab, in the hope of persuading them to adopt them. The potential benefits of virtual world government of the sort best achievable through governance tools include the prorogation of the rule of law and democracy, effective enforcement of rules, and the promotion of a healthy and stable commercial economy by such means as effective contract and intellectual property enforcement and dispute resolution. Details of the latest tools proposals and benefits of local governance arrangements can be found on the pages linked to the left, along with transcripts of past meetings.

Anybody interested in promoting local governance in Second Life is encouraged to join the Local Government Study Group within SecondLife, and attend some of our meetings. Notice of the meetings will be posted here and as notices in the group.

Anybody interested in contributing to this wiki should contact Mondrain Lykin, who is in charge of the wiki.

Next meeting

Details on the next meeting will follow.

Agenda for meeting on the 6th of May

ashcroftburnham — Sat, 05 May 2007 10:11:56 CDT

Local Government Study Group
Local Governance Tools, second draft

6th of May 2007, 12.30pm SLT
Volcano

Agenda

1. Introduction

2. Comments by Pelanor Eldrich

3. ?Comments by Kirsty Laval

4. Comments by anonymous

5. Any other tool ideas

6. Open discussion

Form of the meeting

The meeting will be run in much the same way as previous meetings. I will make a brief introduction, and then we will move on to discussing each person's comments in turn. To ensure that the meeting is progressed expeditiously, and that everyone gets a fair say, a chair appointed for the meeting will select from those who indicate via IM that they wish to talk to either make a brief statement (the chair will set the time to ensure that all have a fair say), or ask a question to either the original proposer of the comments (if present) or a person who has made a subsequent statement, or some combination of the two, whereupon that person will have a specific time in which to answer.

Agenda item no. 5 covers any tools proposals not mentioned in the latest draft. Anybody intending to attend the meeting can send me a notecard in advance with an item to add to no. 5, and items may also be added on the day. Notecards with such additional items will be distributed in advance of the meeting.

Item no. 6 will be an informal open discussion, where those who have not had a chance to have their say earlier might do so, and further questions can be posed.

Please note that this will not be a meeting to discuss the benefits of local governance in general: there have already been two meetings on that topic. This will be a meeting to discuss the detailed tools proposals.

Those engaging in disruptive or abusive conduct will be banned. Everyone is entitled to a fair say, but should not use that opportunity to make personal comments, nor attempt to deny others a fair say. Security will be on hand to ban griefers or those who disrupt the meeting. Healthy debate, however, is welcomed.

Legal Systems: Common Law vs Civil Law

Kristy.Laval — Tue, 01 May 2007 13:15:35 CDT

If you are unaware of the differences between Common Law and Civil Law systems, like me you will be interested to read these articles on Wikipedia.

And for those who might just want a summary, here is an abstract from Wikipedia :

"Thus, the difference between civil law and common law lies not just in the mere fact of codification, but in the methodological approach to codes and statutes. In civil law countries, legislation is seen as the primary source of law. By default, courts thus base their judgments on the provisions of codes and statutes, from which solutions in particular cases are to be derived. Courts thus have to reason extensively on the basis of general rules and principles of the code, often drawing analogies from statutory provisions to fill lacunae and to achieve coherence. By contrast, in the common law system, cases are the primary source of law, while statutes are only seen as incursions into the common law and thus interpreted narrowly."

I hope this helps non legalese aware folks to understand about the two different systems.

Devolution of abuse reporting and parallelism

ashcroftburnham — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 15:23:53 CDT

A commentary

Introduction
Recently, Linden Lab, creator of SecondLife, announced a change of policy with respect to abuse reporting, introducing what it termed, "Estate level governance", and in so doing, made some substantial reconceptualisations of certain aspects of SecondLife, with potentially important implications for local governance.

The change
Traditionally, all those who use SecondLife have been bound by two separate but linked standards: the Terms of Service, the general legal agreement between all users of SecondLife and Linden Lab, which serves much the same function as the terms of service of, for example, an ISP or web hosting provider, and the Community Standards, a document prescribing generally acceptable behaviour within SecondLife. Those standards were both enforced by Linden Lab, with such sanctions as warnings, or temporary or permanent banishments from SecondLife as a whole, and policed by individual users filing abuse reports, using a dedicated tool in the software client to do so. The abuse reports would be sent straight to Linden Lab, who would consider what, if any, action to take in respect of them.

The new model that is going to be introduced soon (the date for its introduction has not yet been announced, although the scheme has been piloted since January) is that, on private island estates only, the owners of those private islands will have the option of receiving at least some categories of abuse reports themselves, and dealing with them themselves. (Wisely, Linden Lab will retain certain sorts of abuse reports, including reports of suspected underage people and password fraud). There will also be the chance for owners of private island estates to pay for as yet unspecified premium Linden-based abuse reporting system. Also promised are as yet unspecified further governance tools.

The reconceptualisation
It is quite clear from the responses to the official announcement that the change is designed to be part of a reconceptualisation of SecondLife as a whole: the term "SecondLife" will, it seems, apply just to the mainland (where hitherto it described the whole virtual world, including software and protocol), and the whole of what is now called "SecondLife" will be called "the grid" (a term previously reserved for specific sets of connected estates, such as the main grid, the teen grid, and the beta grid). Whether exactly this renaming will stick remains to be seen (what will Linden Lab call the software if the term "SecondLife" is reserved for just the mainland(s)?), but the substantial change of policy is one of exercising a fundamentally different level of control over private islands (which are now to be known as "estates", presumably in contemplation of the prospect of whole private continents) as distinct from the mainland, a move earlier hinted at by Robin Linden during the most recent meeting of the LGSG.

This appears to be a firm resolution to the tension that hitherto existed, at least in theory, between SecondLife as a single virtual community (Philip Rosedale/Linden is known for saying that he was intending to create a whole country), and as an abstract technological platform for virtual worlds in general; in other words, is SecondLife a virtual world equivalent of one huge website (a wiki, perhaps), or the whole web? The answer now appears to be, eventually at least, both. The mainland(s) will be a single (sort of) community, governed by the community standards as well as the terms of service, in which Linden Lab will decide (and enforce) the way in which people should behave (as moderators on a web forum would), and the wider grid, consisting of private islands, will be a network in a technical, but not necessarily a social, sense, on which those individuals (or, hopefully, one day, individuals and groups) who rent servers from Linden Lab (or, eventually, anyone) to run private islands, or even, perhaps, private continents, will have near total freedom to decide what, if any, behavioural standards to apply to their regions, and how, if at all, to enforce those standards. It might well be that the Community Standards themselves will one day apply only to the mainland and those private estates whose owners choose voluntarily to adopt them, only the Terms of Service being generally applicable.

The implications for local governance
Putting aside for a moment the very promising, albeit somewhat vague, announcements that Linden Lab is working on further, as yet unspecified, governance tools, the implications for local government in SecondLife (or "the grid", or whatever is now the appropriate term) are mixed: on the one hand, the move is positive, in that it shows that Linden Lab are, in respect at least of private estates, firmly committed to devolving control to local regions, and giving localities the power to set and deal with their own standards of behaviour. The next important development would be to allow group control of private estates to give real choice and flexibility in self-governance. On the other hand, however, the mainland/private estates split implies that Linden Lab might believe that no governance tools at all ought be implemented on the mainland.

That would be of some considerable concern, since there is substantial demand (and need) for governance tools, of a voluntary, opt-in nature, throughout the grid, both on the mainland and private estates: Linden Lab is not, for example, ever going to make itself responsible for enforcing covenants or in-world contracts or preventing land blight: it simply does not have the judicial resources to tackle such conceptually complicated disputes. Nonetheless, those disputes are very real, and just as real (if not more so) on the mainland as elsewhere. A substantial number of people want a proper way of securing a formal resolution to those disputes, and it would be a terrible waste of an opportunity if those means were only made available to those on private estates. It would greatly impoverish the SecondLife experience if only some regions had even the technical wherewithal to set up means to resolve such disputes.

The relevance of parallelism
In reality, there is no inherent conflict between, on the one hand, a virtual continent, or series of continents, over which Linden Lab retain a substantial degree of control over standards of behaviour, as distinct to private estates over which it retains no such control, and, on the other hand, tools for effective local governance throughout both sorts of region. The key to the compatibility is in normative parallelism.

The principle of normative parallelism in this context is simply this: it is easily possible for two separate normative systems to exist in parallel in the same domain. So, for domain X, normative system A might impose duties P and Q, normative system B might impose duties Q and R, and normative system C might impose duty S, each with its own, independent, means of enforcement, without necessarily creating any conflict. With one exception, the same is true of all kinds of normative relations, including rights, liabilities, privileges, etc. The one exception is that a conflict would arise if any normative system purported to mandate that which another normative system prohibited.

A good practical example of parallelism is sport. A person who engages in, say, football (or "soccer" as those from the States call it) is bound by (at least) two normative systems in parallel: (1) the rules of soccer; and (2) the law of the land of whichever legal jurisdiction the football match is taking place in. The two do not conflict: they live happily side by side. The rules of soccer prohibit handling the ball, whereas national law permits it (but does not mandate it). So, handling the ball during a soccer game might result in being sent off (the soccer game's means of enforcing its norms), but would not result in a criminal conviction and sentence (the national law's means of enforcing its norms). Both the rules of soccer and national law prohibit physically beating another player during a match: such conduct would likely result both in being sent off and a criminal conviction and penalty. The national law, but not the rules of soccer, prohibit stealing another player's wallet from the changing room: such conduct by a player would not result in, say, a free kick or a change of the score, but would result (if detected) in a criminal conviction and sentence.

There is no conflict between the two normative systems: those who play football are not doing anything wrong merely because the rules of the game do not prohibit, for example, theft (there is no duty upon those devising their own normative systems independently to prohibit everything already prohibited by any other given applicable normative system), nor are those norms that exist only in soccer unenforceable through want of status in national law (it would be absurd to imagine somebody suing somebody for handling the ball), nor is the football referee improperly meddling in national legal affairs by sending off the player who beats another player during the course of a game. Another interesting point to note is that soccer is played in many countries in which different legal systems prevail, yet the rules of soccer remain unchanged in all of them. What would create a conflict is if a sport encouraged or required of its participators, for example, that they assault innocent members of the public: then there would be a conflict between the two normative systems, and, in that case, the superior normative system, that of national law, would prevail and rightly prohibit taking part in that particular sport at all.

That analysis, I think, fully answers those critics of local governance who claim that it is not possible or desirable merely because a given system of local governance might not replicate exactly any given national legal system (or, alternatively, private international law), or that, absent enforcement in national courts, it is worthless: the rules made by local governments in SecondLife would be just as lawful, and just as enforceable, as the rules of soccer.

The relevance of the analysis of parallelism to the recent Linden Lab announcement about abuse reporting,and the reconceptualisation of SecondLife, is that there is nothing intrinsically incompatible between a mainland in which one normative system (the Linden Lab community standards) applies, and having individual local governments apply and enforce their own normative standards in that same domain in parallel.

Just like the game of soccer and the national law, the two normative standards would have different, albeit occasionally overlapping, functions: local rules might prohibit, for example, contravening a covenant, whereas the Community Standards do not (the equivalent of handling the ball); local rules might also prohibit general griefing, also prohibited by the Community Standards, but have a different enforcement mechanism (the equivalent of the foul that is also a battery/assault); and local rules might be silent on unauthorised disclosure, that is prohibited by the Community Standards (the equivalent of the theft from the locker room).

So, whilst private estate owners perhaps need even more tools than mainland landowners to deal with their private estates, mainland landowners too need tools that they do not presently have to form themselves into governments, with the flexibility to assign different powers amongst different members of the group without having a residual sovereign with absolute power, and the power to enforce effectively all of its decisions, in order that local normative systems, running in parallel to the Community Standards, can grow up and serve the very real needs outlined in the discussion on benefits of local government in virtual worlds. The tools that I propose are, I should suggest, just what are needed to achieve those important aims.

Ashcroft Burnham
25th of April 2007

LGSG Proposed Tools - 2nd Draft

mondrianlykin — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 07:58:04 CDT

Following feedback on the first draft of my governance tools proposals, I reproduce here my second draft for any further comments.

Local Government Study Group – second draft of proposals for governance tools

1.A new group-like abstraction called a “government” (query whether this is the best name; consider “state”) that anybody should be able to create for a fee (perhaps a higher fee than the group fees – maybe L$1,000?) should be encoded.

2.Each government should have a dataset accessible through a dialogue box a little like that for groups, including:
(a)the name of the government;
(b)a short description of the government type (e.g., “democracy” or “monarchy”);
(c)a graphic for a flag, emblem, coat of arms, or the like;
(d)a music URL for a national anthem;
(e)a large text box for a constitution;
(f)a smaller text box for a brief description of the aims and basic principles of the government;
(g)details as to the land and citizens; and
(h)details as to how the decision-making powers (see below) are distributed.

3.Any given parcel of land should be allied to either one specific government or no government. When it is allied to one specific government, the name of the government should appear in the “About>Land” box. When allied to no government, the word “anarchy” (or, perhaps, “ungoverned” or “none”) should appear in the “government” section thereof.

4.Any estate owner of an island or parcel of land in anarchy should be able to choose to place that land under the control of any given extant government.

5.If an entire mainland sim falls under the control of one government, the full set of estate tools available to private island owners should be available to that government.

6.The relationship between the government and landowner should be thought of in the same way as the relationship between a real-life government and people with freeholds of land in that state.

7.Governments should be able to set software-encoded rules on secession of land from those governments. Those rules should be either (1) allow always; or (2) allow only with consent of X persons, where X persons are public officials of the government.

8.Governments should not be able to change the rules on secession of any given piece of land from “allow always” to “allow only with consent” without the consent of the owner of that piece of land.

9.The buying and selling of existing parcels/sims should not by itself change the government to which they are allied.

10.All land should start as under the control of no government, and only be placed under the control of any given government by a specific landowner.

11.Linden Lab should not favour any given government over any other, nor give any given government powers that other governments cannot obtain.

12.There should be very prominent confirmation dialogues when for the joining of any given piece of land to any given government, explaining the consequences, and highlighting especially clearly if one is joining a non-scedeable government.

13. All abuse reports (save of certain types that Linden Lab wishes to reserve to itself, such as, for example, reports about password theft and about activities (such as the creation of self replicating objects) that might injuriously impact the whole grid or substantial parts of it) should be directed to governments, rather than to Linden Lab.

14.Abuse reports made through the menu would be directed towards the government on whose land the person making the report is currently standing. There should be a checkbox option to send the report to LL instead, requiring the user in such a case to specify which of the specific types of abuse that LL has decided it ought to retain control over reporting is being complained of.

15.There should be a new means of abuse reporting, by right-clicking an avatar and selecting “report abuse...” from the pie menu. This should give a third possible destination for an abuse report, that is any given government of which that avatar is a citizen. It should be possible to send the same abuse reports to multiple permissible destinations by selecting multiple checkboxes, i.e., reporting the same conduct to LL, the government on whose land the abuse occurred, and the suspect's home government.

16.Where the land on which the abuse report is made is ungoverned (“in anarchy”?), no abuse report except to LL (and only on the restricted grounds), or the avatar's own government(s), if any, should be possible.

17.The only exception should be on Governor Linden held land, where LL should continue to handle all general griefing abuse reports for the foreseeable future.

18.The powers of a given government should be able to vary depending on a dialogue box configuration by whatever person or group first forms the government. At minimum, all governments should be able to banish any non-citizen of that government from all land held under that government for an indefinite period. Additional configurable powers should include:
(a)the power to ban citizens from land in the jurisdiction of that government;
(b)the power to requisition land that is in the jurisdiction of that government, with or without banishing the landowner;
(c)the power to levy a tax on citizens of that government (which could be configured to be capped at a certain level per unit of land or per citizen, and configurable to be at different rates for different citizens/groups to give tax breaks for non-profit organisations, etc.);
(d)the power to give any given avatar negative reputation points that appear on that avatar's profile, but *only to citizens of that government*;
(e)the power to set automated banishments for exceeding a stipulated number of negative reputation points, either until manually revoked, or for a stipulated period;
(f)the power to enable people to become citizens, not just by owning an estate in the sim (or, in the case of a private island, being either the estate owner or a holder of a parcel), but by putting up a liquid escrow (explained below), and to foreclose on that liquid escrow; and
(g)the power to make treaties with other governments and join federations, confederations and commonwealths.

19.A liquid escrow is a system whereby an avatar enters into a software-encoded arrangement with a government to give it the power to fine that avatar up to a stipulated amount (whether all at once or incrementally), in return for citizenship of that government.

20.A government should be able to remove up to the amount stipulated in the liquid escrow from a citizen's or former citizen's Linden dollar balance without any the avatar whose balance it is having any further say in the matter.

21.Where an avatar leaves the jurisdiction of a government, configurable rules should stipulate whether the escrow is automatically forfeit, or, if it is not, the time period within which the government can still forfeit any of the escrow.

22.When an escrow is forfeit from an avatar with a Linden dollar balance of an amount less than the amount forfeit, the Linden dollar balance should display on that avatar's account as a negative amount. Any money paid into that avatar's account should go straight to paying off the rest of the escrow forfeit until the account is fully settled.

23.With taxes, each time that a tax payment is due (there should probably be a maximum frequency of a week), the citizen should be presented with a dialogue box, giving the citizen a choice of either paying the tax, or relinquishing citizenship, although a citizen should be able to set it such that the tax is paid automatically, although that should be reversible at any time).

24.Whether or not a government has any of the above stipulated additional powers should, once initially set, not be able to be changed without the individual consent of all landowning citizens or, if the government was initially so configured, all citizens, whether landowning or not.

25.It should be possible to set up a government and configure it in a sandbox state, without allowing anybody to join as citizens, until it is ready. In that state, any decision should be able to be undone by the person who founded it.

26.Each government should have a set of configurable offices of state (such as “king” or “prime minister” or “treasurer” or “policeman” or “member of parliament”), each with configurable (and preferably scriptable) subsets of the government's power.

27.It should also be possible to have citizen-wide elections at specified intervals. The voting system should be scriptable, but, for those who cannot script, a number of popular voting models should be built ready-made into the system.

28. For example, it should be possible to set up a government so that the text in the “Constitution” dialogue box can be changed to a specified alternative wording only if a certain proportion of people who hold a certain configured rank vote in favour of it. Another example: it should be configurable so that people can only be banished if a certain proportion of set of people (a jury) stipulated by a holder of a particular public office (a court administrator) vote in a particular way on a specified question put to them by another stipulated office holder (a judge). Simpler, more despotic systems, should be possible, too.

29.It should be possible to restrict scripted functions (such as holding office or voting) to avatars that have been verified (perhaps by a third party identity verification agency) as being unique, and not an alternate account of any other verified avatar.

30.There should be a number of pre-configured systems of government available for those who do not have the skills to script one from scratch, and it should be possible to trade government configurations.

31.Governments that have the power to enter treaties should be able to do so so as to share powers on banishments, forfeiture of liquid escrows and negative reputation points, giving each government the power to banish citizens and/or non-citizens from the area controlled by both governments, give negative reputation points that are visible to citizens of both governments, etc. The exercise of such powers should be configurable in the same way as the other powers, so that it can be set up so that (for example) a referendum is required before such a thing is entered into.

32.It should be possible to have nested hierarchical structures of governments (i.e., permitting one or more governments to be members of other governments) to permit federal and related structures. Secession rules should be the same as with landowners to governments. The power to enter into federations etc. should work in the same way as the power to enter into treaties. When a government becomes a member of another government, there should be a configurable set of options as to which of the two levels of government have what power in relation to the citizens/land of the joining government. Once agreed upon by those who have been configured to have the power to do so in both the joining and joined governments, that should not be able to be changed (aside from unilateral secession, if permitted) without authority of all those who have the power to make decisions of that sort in both levels of government.

33.Governments should be able to have their own Linden dollar accounts. All taxes and forfeitures of liquid escrows should be paid into this account. Dealing with the account should be possible only in accordance with the configured powers to do so, as with all other configured powers.

34.Where any piece of land under government control has no owner (which is the state in which it will be if it is effectively a public space owned by the government), any tier due on that land should be payable out of the government treasury. A failure to pay the tier should have the same effect as regards a government as it now does as regards any private landowner: the land should return to Governor Linden control, and be automatically seceded.

35.Where any landowner in the government fails to pay tier, however, the land should not return to Governor Linden control unless the government itself subsequently fails to pay tier.

36.A government should be able to abandon any land not owned by any citizen at any time.

37.If any government ceases to exist, all its owned land should revert to an ungoverned state, and all its unowned land to Governor Linden.
38.An avatar should be able to be a citizen of any number of governments.

39.It should be possible for objects to be owned by governments in the same way as they can currently be owned by groups.

40.Lists of and statistics about governments should be available on the SecondLife website.

41.Any citizen of any government should be able to send a ping to that government.

42.A government should be able to be configured as to which avatars are authorised to respond to pings.

43.A ping should cause a dialogue box to appear for avatars who are so authorised, explaining that a ping has been sent, and enquiring as to whether they still wish the government to continue to operate. The message should have three options: “yes”, “no”, and “ignore”.

44.If “ignore” is selected, the dialogue box should go away, but anybody duly authorised should be able to make the choice later by going to the general government dialogue.

45.If anybody responds “no”, or no response at all is received within 30 days, the government should become inactive, resetting to the sandbox state, losing all citizens, and reverting all land to ungoverned (if owned) or Governor Linden (if not owned by anything other than the government).

46.Governments should be configurable such that some avatars can be authorised to answer “yes” or “ignore”, but not “no” to a ping.

47.Once one ping has been sent, it should not be possible to send another ping to that same government until 14 days have elapsed after somebody acknowledged it with a “yes” response.

Benefits of local governance in virtual worlds

ashcroftburnham — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:45:43 CDT

Contents

The importance of locality: choice, market forces and open sourcing
Griefing, due process and security
Contract enforcement, IP and commerce
Financial services regulation
Land enforcement
Group organisation and asset sharing
Self-regulation discourages external regulation
Social experimentation and publicity
The relevance of identity verification

The importance of locality: choice, market forces and open sourcing

Government has been a perennially controversial issue for virtual worlds. A seizable number of those who wish to participate in virtual worlds do not want to have imposed on them by the creators of that virtual world, and without them having any choice in the matter, a system of government that restricts their behaviour on pain of sanctions executed in that virtual world: people fear, perhaps understandably, that the powers of such a universal government, once divorced from the market forces that drives the original creator to make any interventions minimal and at least passably fair, would be likely to be used either capriciously or for illegitimate financial gain.

The corollary of that, however, is that there are a substantial number of governance functions, whose nature and importance are addressed below, which need, in order to be performed effectively, frequent and carefully discriminating human intervention, of the sort that is beyond the practical capability of the organisation behind the virtual world's technology to resource effectively as the virtual world expands rapidly. If the only choices are between universal resident government or no resident government, a virtual world finds itself either missing important governance functions, or under the control of those who might act irresponsibly or maliciously, both of which are singularly unsatisfactory states of affairs.

A system of local governance, however, where specific territories (made up of sets of units of virtual land), and perhaps even specific sets of citizens defined other than by territory, are governed, to a greater or lesser extent, by governments specific to those territories, has none of those drawbacks. Governance functions can effectively be crowdsourced to residents without giving any set of people the universal powers of the sort that can enable abuses of those powers. A system where those who, as virtual landowners, control particular geographical regions can decide for themselves, either at the time of purchase if the land is already governed, or after purchase if it is not, what, if any user-run government (including one that the landowner may choose to create for her or himself) should exercise the valuable governance functions described below in relation to that territory is a system that enables competition and market forces to act as an important check against potential abuses of governmental power, and simultaneously to promote the emergence of the best governments, in accordance with the usual rules of crowdsourcing, whereby the best quickly becomes the most popular.

Additionally, local governance prevents a state of affairs that can arise in a universal governance model in which individual virtual landowners, the paying customers of the technology providers, consider themselves, by forces beyond their control, to have been done out of the freedom of action on their own virtual land which constituted the motivation for the purchase of that land in the first place. Furthermore, unlike a universal model, local governance provides an environment in which the benefits of government per se are market-tested, since governments would not merely be competing for popularity among existing or putative landowners with other governments, but with the absence of government, which ought to be the default position for all new land, and all existing land immediately after the implementation of governance tools. Given the diversity of purposes for which people use virtual worlds, it is highly likely that different levels of governance, including in many cases the absence of governance, will turn out to be appropriate for different functions. For example, a large corporation buying a series of islands as a showcase for its products or services might want a system whereby misbehaviour on its lands can be punished by banishment without it having to do any of the hard work, but where it retains ultimate control; a commercial landlord might want a full-fledged system of civil law, including contract and covenant enforcement to entice serious businesses and consumers at once; a group of aspiring businesspeople and artisans wishing to start their own community and share resources might want a democratically elected local council; and an individual who wants an island for creating whimsical artistic follies might want no government at all. Some landowners might want to run their own governments; some might want to participate in governments of territories larger than their individual landholdings; and some might want others to do all the governance hard work for them. Only in a model of local governance are all such things simultaneously possible.

Furthermore, there will always be great controversy over which means of running and structuring a government are best; the only effective way of preventing such controversies from causing damaging conflicts is to permit multiple models of government to emerge simultaneously, such that people can choose to be a part of whatever government structure most closely aligns with her or his own views on how governments ought to be run. People will be infinitely more productive when the conflicts about how government ought to be run are between different governments (which creates healthy competition), rather than within the same government (which creates stultifying in-fighting and destructive acrimony).

Finally, if the architecture of the virtual world becomes open-sourced, then no form of governance other than local governance is practicable. If the creator of the virtual world becomes in effect like those who invented the technology behind the internet, and the virtual world, like the world wide web, becomes a platform, then the governance of activities in virtual worlds can ultimately be determined only by those who run the servers upon which the virtual world operates. Centralisation of control is impossible. The operators of devolved servers might well, of course, wish to let them on a commercial basis, and let their lessors choose how, if at all, and by whom their virtual land is to be governed, but universalisation of control is not possible. If a virtual world is to become open-sourced, then the governance tools need to be built into the basic code, and have time to bed in and become used, long before the server source code is released, in order to enable the practice of local governments to become well established before the control of the source code is fragmented.

Ultimately, a system of local governments is a system where government becomes a useful and valued additional feature of the virtual world about which residents of that virtual world have choice, rather than a source of conflict and suspicion, and is the only practical system of governance in an open-sourced environment.

Griefing, due process and security

One of the important features of local governance in a virtual world is dealing both effectively and fairly with those users of the virtual world who, through their behaviour, make the use of the virtual world around them by other users substantially less pleasant than it ought to be. Such conduct is colloquially known as “griefing”, and its perpetrators “griefers”. Some acts of griefing affect the entire virtual world (such as attempts to hack into its database servers, or compromise password security), and such acts ought always be dealt with by the creator and/or maintainer of the virtual world itself, partly because such people have the most effective means to do so, and partly because such people have a strong interest in doing so. Most griefing, however, occurs on a smaller scale, creating substantial, albeit usually relatively short-lived, annoyance to those around the griefer. It is griefing of this kind that is a problem best suited to be solved by local governments.

Responses to griefing need to be both effective in preventing occurrence or recurrence of the misconduct, and steadfastly fair to those who find themselves accused of being griefers themselves. That is no easy task: the number of instances of griefing multiplied by the amount of work required fairly to investigate and adjudicate upon both sides of the story in each case is considerable. Not only does such a task require time and effort: it requires skill, and a sound temperament. The organisation that creates and/or operates a virtual world is not, at least when the virtual world in question reaches an appreciable size, likely to have anywhere near the resources available necessary to deal with such issues.

Local governments, however, can distribute the workload effectively by localising investigation, adjudication and enforcement. The resource-motive comes from the desire of those with an interest in the success of the government in question, whether directly or indirectly, to ensure that both griefing and false or unfounded accusations of griefing are properly controlled within their jurisdiction. Because the system of local governance creates the potential significant competition between governments, those local governments that most fairly and effectively deal with griefing will tend to be amongst the most successful, and will tend to control the greatest proportion of territories. The efficiency with which information can be communicated over electronic media makes discovering true instances, and debunking false claims of instances, of the capricious or otherwise unfair imposition of sanctions easy. There is already a large and growing contingent of people seriously interested in the operation of law in virtual worlds, so the pool from which skilled adjudicators (and, no doubt, in time, advocates) can be drawn is large and growing.

Enforcement, although localised, can be effective: banishing those found guilty of wrongdoing from the territory that a government controls prevents the wrongdoing recurring on that territory for the duration of the banishment, and, in so far as the person in question derives enjoyment from visiting the place in question, can prove an effective deterrence. The preventative and deterrent effect can be multiplied when various governments have reciprocal banishment agreements with each other, or are part of a federation in which, once a person is banished from one state of the federation, one is banned from all. The importance of due process not forgotten, however, it is important to note that a government that associates itself by treaty with a government known for capricious or unfair banishments is likely to acquire such a reputation itself, and risk losing substantial popularity and therefore control as a result thereof. Market forces always act in the background to prevent undue caprice.

Contract enforcement, IP and commerce

Once considered merely an idle game, virtual worlds are now a hotbed of virtual commerce, with substantial sums of money, with real life value, traded every day. The trade in virtual goods can be lucrative for those particularly skilled at producing what is in great demand, and the lure of being able to earn money by doing something that feels like playing a computer game is powerful for many.

The commercial success of virtual worlds is not, however, without its problems. Wherever there is money to be made, there are those who seek to line their pockets with little work by defrauding others. Furthermore, since virtual goods are, by their very nature, intangible, a myriad disputes about intellectual property violations arise every day, from the mundane, involving low-value items made only in the virtual world, to the very serious, involving the improper use of real life intellectual property such as trademarks, and everything in between.

The difficulty faced by many virtual entrepreneurs is that, because the value of goods and services in virtual worlds is so much less than their real-world equivalent (although economies of scale often mean that the overall profits from such activity can nonetheless be considerable), because virtual worlds are inherently international in nature, and because it is an important feature of virtual worlds for many that their real life identity not be imparted to anybody who knows them only through the virtual world, resolving commercial disputes that, in real life, would relatively easily be solved by a stiff letter from a lawyer, or, eventually, litigation, becomes vastly cost-inefficient. If people make a contract with each other in a virtual world, knowing only each other's avatar names, the contract is not performed, and one side accuses the other of breaking it, that party has, in practical terms, no redress: he or she will almost certainly not be able to find the counterparty to a contract, let alone find that person's local court, and be able to instruct a lawyer who knows what the law is there, even assuming that the intractable problem of which law applies can sensibly be resolved (agreements with the provider of the virtual world service that disputes are to be resolved according to the law local to the virtual world provider do not govern (and, in many jurisdictions, could not even if they tried) what law should govern disputes between two or more independent people).

Such a difficulty is, fortunately for the success of virtual worlds, not as serious as it would be if it arose in a real-life country because virtual worlds have technological means of making many sorts of transactions difficult or impossible to exploit: virtual items can be set so that they automatically dispatch themselves once the seller has been paid the correct amount of money, and so forth. Furthermore, the ability to communicate effectively through electronic means makes it easy to disseminate information about those who deliberately and obviously defraud others. With such means, simple and straightforward transactions (usually of the nature of the sale/purchase of virtual goods) can be carried out in a virtual world with a considerable degree of confidence, even absent human-intervention based enforcement mechanisms.

However, any attempt to engage in more sophisticated transactions, for example, contracts of employment, or construction contracts, or contracts for all manner of services, meets with the often impenetrable problem that, if one cannot be sure that the person with whom one is entering into the agreement is trustworthy, the agreement is worth no more than the paper that it is not written on. Although undoubtedly some people can and do build relationships of trust, either by revealing their real-life identity and transacting in real-life currencies, or by having amassed a formidable reputation of trustworthiness over a significant period of time, having to go to such lengths in order to engage in what would in real life be considered positively prosaic transactions makes the economy substantially less efficient than it could be. Furthermore, although obvious frauds (such as scripted items that take money but refuse to dispense the objects that they purportedly sell) can easily be foiled, at least in part, by mere communication, complicated contractual disputes in which both parties, apparently plausibly to an uninitiated outside observer, claim to be in the right, are not susceptible to such simplistic means of resolution.

If, however, a system (or, more accurately, a series of systems) of civil justice, run by those who inhabit the virtual world, rather than by those who create it, with all of the advantages of the local model of governance described above, were to come into existence, then such problems could be greatly diminished: it would be easy for governments to establish rules as to whose law applied in what circumstances (which, in any event, would be limited in practice by their powers of enforcement and likely desire not to waste resources attempting to resolve disputes that have no bearing on their citizens, those whose continued support would be necessary for their continued success), in-world legal systems could operate effectively, using the powers of enforcement described above, without knowing the people's real-life identities, and would be subject to the same deflated pricing that applies to the rest of the virtual world, removing the issue of expense non-proportionality.

The same applies to intellectual property disputes: these most intractable of problems could be diminished non-trivially if those who were found by official adjudicators of specific governments to have violated others' IP rights could, ultimately, be banished from the territory controlled by those governments, and such enforcement would come at a cost far less than the equivalent action in a real-life court. Even larger-scale disputes, involving intellectual property outside the virtual world, could be resolved by combined approach of litigation in in-world courts to provide a speedy, cheap immediate interim remedy against the perpetrator, with the threat (or actuality) of real-life litigation if that proves inadequate. Large corporations may realise that all but the most professional or persistent of, for example, trademark infringers, can be deterred by the threat, or actuality, of being banished from wherever it is they own their virtual land or do their virtual business, which option would be considerably cheaper than litigating in real-world courts where it proves effective.

Financial services regulation

As with the enforcement of contracts, the design, institution and enforcement of regulations pertaining to financial service institutions operating solely within virtual worlds is a task that can only practically be compassed by local governments. Although, unlike their real life counterparts, governments in virtual worlds, especially open-sourced ones, cannot stop financial institutions buying their own fresh land, unbeholden to any government, and conducting their unregulated financial business there, governments can at least publicise an approved list of financial service operators who do operate within the rules, adjudicate effectively any disputes about whether they have broken any of the rules, and prevent those who operate outside the rules from operating within that government's territory, or even banish those who run such institutions from their territories.

Such uses of government are of potentially considerable interest given the recent concern that has arisen about a number of banks who operate only in the virtual world. However, if one pauses to consider the possibility that real-life banking corporations may one day want to open banks in virtual worlds, too, answering the otherwise intractable problem of to which, if any, set of real-life national regulations that such accounts should be subject, it will become apparent that the issue extends beyond concerned about the fiscal prudence (or legitimacy) shoestring amateur organisations.

Land enforcement

Virtual land is the most basic of commodities in a virtual world, and, as virtual worlds have proved in their operation, disputes over land have the potential to cause substantial acrimony and wasted economic effort and potential. Disputes can arise about intrusive objects or buildings on neighbouring land, resource utilisation where neighbouring lands share resources, such as a limited number of people able to access a region, or about the purchase and sale of land.

Although, in many respects, disputes relating to land can be resolved in a similar fashion to disputes relating to contracts, intellectual property or alleged griefing, an additional element of complexity arises in the local government model because the jurisdiction of a local government is tied to a particular virtual-geographical territory. Disputes within that territory could readily be resolved, but disputes between landowners in different governments, or even between different governments, might pose greater problems.

However, such potential for difficulty must be put in perspective. Firstly, it is inherently no greater than the problems that can arise between landowners in the absence of government. Secondly, economic factors have a good chance of maximising the number of disputes of this nature that can effectively be resolved.

The economic pressures that have a good chance of resulting in local governments having a good success rate in solving land disputes arise from the premise that units of land that share a government with all or most other units of land with which resource and other such disputes are likely to arise are likely, for that reason, to be more valuable than units of land that do not so share, because there is a substantial advantage to potential purchasers of land in having potential disputes resolved effectively. That will, in turn, create an economic incentive for governments and owners of land to cause land to be configured such that it maximises dispute resolution possibilities.

Within land controlled by a single government, planning rules (as prescriptive or open-ended as market forces demand) could help to prevent land blight, and an equivalent of what is in some real-life common law jurisdictions called the tort of nuisance could deal with residual disputes about the effect of allegedly undesirable activities upon neighbouring landowers. Such capacity for dispute resolution has, in turn, the potential to create communities and landscapes of sorts not previously seen in virtual worlds: something between the unrelentingly eclectic (and often downright clashing) and the starkly uniform (of the sort that results from the entire design being created or overseen by one person, or a small group of people).

Group organisation and asset sharing

Many people in virtual worlds like to go it alone, but many others desire to engage in group activity. Much of that group activity requires shared, group land, but, in a system whereby any unit of land can only be owned by either a single individual, or all members of a group equally, many desirable configurations are impossible. A group, for example, that wants to set itself up as a community of producers of goods with a certain theme, and also let small residences that share that theme to outsiders, needs a system in which the overall control of land is centralised (to ensure that the theme is maintained, for example), but where individual plots of land can be individually controlled to a considerable extent by individual owners thereof. A local government could enable such groups effectively to form local councils to oversee the management of their land, whilst enabling the individual members of that group to retain substantial personal control over their individual parcels of land.

Similarly, where land is sold by the creator of the virtual world (or, when open-sourced, by its server vendors) only in bulk units corresponding. for example, to whole servers, which are substantially beyond the price range of most, many people might be motivated to form groups to buy a part of a new such unit of virtual land, on the understanding that the whole unit will be run in a particular way. Without relying on specific trustworthy individuals, capable of handling large quantities of money on behalf of other people both honestly and diligently, such an arrangement is impossible without local government. The ability of such arrangements to emerge has the potential to increase demand for virtual land, as the number of permutations of use possibilities increase: such arrangements would undoubtedly have the capability to make purchases of new land substantially less uncertain than they might otherwise be. For this head of benefit, flexibility is key.

Self-regulation discourages external regulation

Many are concerned at the future possibility of real-life governments making virtual worlds far less pleasant places by over-regulating them. However, it is a far harder to claim that something needs regulating if it already regulates itself in an efficient, systematic and professional way than if it is wholly unregulated. Given the potential for a system of local governments, through the market forces of crowd-sourcing and competition, to produce high-quality, professional systems of law, there is a good chance that the existence of systems of local government will help to dissuade real-life governments from overly restricting desirable activity within virtual worlds.

Furthermore, there has recently been discussion of whether virtual assets ought to be taxed, not just when they are converted into real assets, but in their status as virtual assets, too. Such a highly undesirable step could potentially be shown to be even more absurd than it now appears by pointing out that there are already governments in virtual worlds, which would be the appropriate destination for any tax revenue generated solely in virtual worlds, and that what, if any, tax to charge on such assets should be a matter for those governments.

Social experimentation and publicity

Whilst the functions of social experimentation and publicity are necessarily ancillary functions of local governments, they are certainly not trivial functions. A virtual world that can claim to have proven a hitherto untested system of government either successful or unsuccessful, or that can demonstrate, with the extreme swiftness and efficiency possible only in virtual worlds, what aspects of governments are more or less effective at, for example, improving efficiency or preventing abuses of powers, can not only greatly add to human learning on social organisation, but generate substantial publicity for itself in so doing.

A virtual world so socially and economically advanced that it can claim to be host to a slew of serious, well-organised, efficient governments, staffed in many cases by people with real-life expertise in the areas of governance in question is a virtual world that is so far ahead of any virtual world of which that is not true that it would, in all probability, make it substantially harder for a potential competitor to catch up without first doing the same itself.

Furthermore, the personnel needed to staff governments and their attendant institutions creates a whole new class of potential consumers, both for those who sell virtual land, and for those who sell virtual goods, attracting those to the virtual world who might otherwise be uninterested in such frolics. People (who might in real life be impoverished, either by being students or living in poorer countries) could earn virtual salaries working in virtual government posts, and either spend that money on virtual goods, or use it to go a little way towards working themselves out of poverty, or paying for their tuition.

Ultimately, a virtual world that can claim to be, not just a land in which a few people have interesting buildings, but a world, in the truest sense of the term, with a set of independent but often interconnected nations, is a far richer experience for all of its users than one that is not.

The relevance of identity verification

A potential problem arises in relation to many aspects of virtual worlds, but local governance in particular, relating to the ease by which individuals can register multiple accounts such that it is never possible to tell whether any given person is the alter ego of any other given person (other than oneself). Amongst other local government-related problems, it can lead to voter fraud (single real-life people can use multiple accounts to vote many times), the ineffectiveness of banishment (those banished may create new accounts to return to places from which they were banished) and a false appearance of checks and balances within a government that, in reality, is run by a single person or a very few people, posing as a great many more people. Fortunately, that problem has an elegant and ingenious solution.

A third-party identity verification company can create a system of avatar verification, whereby it is possible to show, with a high degree of conclusiveness, that any one verified avatar is not an alternate account of any other verified avatar. The system would work in the following manner: any avatar wishing to become verified would pay a small fee (the equivalent of several US dollars) to the identity verification company, and provide that company with some clear proof of that person's real-life identity. The person would then, using her or his in-world avatar, and using scripted objects in-world, prove to the company that a specific avatar is controlled by that real-life person by, for example, entering a pass-code generated on proof of real-life identity into an in-world kiosk. The third-party company would never release the real-life identity of the avatar in question to anybody, at least without the person's permission, but would class that avatar as a “verified” avatar by entering the avatar name in question into a database of verified avatars, accessible in XML format by scripted objects in the world, or perhaps even directly accessible through the client software. That real-life person would then be unable to register any other avatar name as verified. There is already an organisation in existence with both the wherewithal and inclination to do just this.

If governments prevented non-verified avatars from, for example, voting, or holding certain government posts, then the potential abuses caused by alternate accounts could be much diminished, if not eliminated entirely.

Update: Linden Lab has recently confirmed that it is planning to introduce its own identity verification system into SecondLife.