An annoyance of Second Life is the vast pretense that there is one world, no factions, no parties, and Unity -- except for of course, the Infamous Antagonist and his alts and friends, but they don't count.
That may be why Justice Soothsayer, joining the party at this juncture, stripped out the names of all the people who signed a letter to the Lindens recently, for some unfathomable reason, possibly in the mistaken belief that to leave them in would make the letter seem like "just one or a few interest groups" or "have the name of the Banned One" on it or whatever, when the intent was to make it sound like the Voice of the People. That's silly. Despite their sectarianism, the forums royals can handle a letter going to Lindens from just a small group of citizens especialy if they publicize it, duh. I hope even the immature and infantile forum royals and IRC gang, with their mouths usually suctioned firmly around the Linden teat, realize that some of the other puppies should get some of the hind milk now and then.
We're growing up now, and we don't get the screaming and gnashing of teeth and cries of "Betrayer! Evil One!" for every time an Interest Group writes or meets with the Lindens -- beyond that Original and Blessed Interest Group called the FIC. At least, I hope so. I noticed that when the telehub compensation was announced, and the news got around that in fact these telehub owners had *gasp* actually met the Lindens on their own, with no Editorial Hare or other hecklers and haters present, without Jeska and the Telehub Discussion Group, etc., nobody really cared anymore. Perhaps because by that time Aimee and co. were plotting how to have their own interest group, meetings, and compensations LOL.
Yet this silly belief in the need for One-ness persists. This is actually a key reason why Khamon's caricature of me as an adherent of the One Grid the Holy Grid the True Grid (did I get it right Khamon yet this time?) is silly -- because I don't think anything of the kind.
I believe in SL, there are multiple and severe clashes of civilization inherited from real-world cultures and political and religious belief systems and social systems; I believe there is a real spectrum of political belief, values, and hence agendas in SL, and therefore it's absolutely folly to pretend it is One. It's even greater folly to think that the technology and the platform themselves can wash away all differences and strife and make us All Get Along.
Wrong. Indeed, one of the ways in which the leftoid tekkie-wikinista gang has been able to keep in power and foist its views on many of us has been to feign unity and seamlessness in this world. They especially like the part where the seamlessnss leads from them and their vaunted notions of themselves and their ideas...right on through the servers to the Lindens, who of course play a vast, complicated, cunning, and clever political game themselves -- in the way that only wide-eyed Californian Dreamin' innocents who claim to have no ideologies, no agendas, and no politics can do. Heck, give me Alcove I and Alcove II any day, compared to these guys, who will not come clean on what their ideology is other than to look off into the middle distance sometimes and talk about a Better World, or to mumble inanities like "We're empowering groups to affect change".
(Note that my pointed question "empowering WHOM to affect change about WHAT got the answer "TBD" from a Linden lol. What he means is "We're going to create new technologies and social tools that enable us to overthrow centuries of human institutions we view as oppressive and outdated, dump politicians and interest groups we view as evil and corrupt, and undermine large corporations we feel are exploiting the people and wasting resources," and I mean "What do you mean we, white man?")
The faction-fighting of SL is therefore often like cats fighting under the rug...or a muddle...or made even more confusing because the Lindens themselves are anything but One, and have lots of factions and sub-factions among their 60-odd staff and board like any organization.
We've all discussed to death Aimee's Matrix, of course, and of course Aimee's Matrix is an artifact of this One Gridism, oddly enough (though it purports to describe parties in SL) because it makes a caricature of any party but itself, the Platform Party, and of course, the Platform Party at some level has the One Grid the Holy Grid All Hail the Grid as its chief sacrament...except when it talks about open-sourcing..but then it merely means a kind of Mass for Shut-Ins on TV when your relative brings home the Holy Communion to you in a special box...you are still partaking of the sacrament of Techological Holyness where somebody Programmed the Software they open-sourced to you.)
As I've pointed out in the entry "Lordfly's Life," it's helpful to remember that with SL, you don't really have this marvelous global cross-section of people that everyone rambles on and on about, you just have Lordfly. I mean, you just have a lot of North American young men with technical skills, disposable income, a cocky attitude, and more education than places to apply it, with $2000 computers, $37/month DSL lines, $400 PSP programs, and 3-D virtual architectural talents. Far from being an "ad hominem attack," this is just a report. Young men with technical skills and talents tend to have a snarky attitude towards those who don't, and like young men the world over down the ages, tend to follow something like that old joke about being anarchists in their teen years; communists in their youth; liberal democrats in their middle ages; and neo-cons in their old age, etc. Revolutions aren't just a young man's game though; they are usually about a profoundly conservative backlash to some other, more unsettling liberal grassroots movement just getting going that is more of a threat to the status-quo-ante than anything else.
Anyway, one of the indulgences of the leftoid pagan technocrati of virtual worlds is that they are at the center of the metaverse, they own it, they code it, its theirs, they are right, and the rest of us are just server load tests, chum, blingtards, or, if we manage to overcome these hurdles, evil land barons and exploiters of Teh Ppl. Of course, they no more speak for "teh ppl" than anybody else, but that seldom disturbs them.
The culture of SL for a long time was like a long, dull, but educational afternoon on National Public Radio. Modulated, concerned voices saying intelligent things and talking about Important Topics, with an occasional sound-byte from some war-torn, blood-bathed spot in the world where voices might be at a more frantic pitch. Town halls have been promoted as some kind of amazing democracy, but they actually, in the last year, have been as static as Kabuki Theater. If you look on the old SL history wiki, you'll see these interesting transcripts of SL that make it appear as if people used to sit around with Philip Linden like you might sit around with your next-door-neighbour at the local pub, shooting the shit. There weren't even 40 avs at a lot of these conversations.
But as the world got bigger, the policing got tighter, and Jeska was put in charge to first load up the pre-questions like Brezhnev's aides on the forums, putting in forums-sanitized questions first to take up the time. Then from the floor, more questions could be accepted from IMs only, not called out. Indeed anyone calling out would face possible expulsion. With the limitations of these formats and funnels, the town halls mainly consisted of push-media, with Philip or whoever pushing their latest policy out and taking a few token questions.
The Community Round Table (from whose listserve I am banned as well for arbitrary and abusive reasons which I haven't taken the time to protest) is more loose in the sense that it seemed for a time to accept a give-and-take format where people could call out thoughts and impressions. That era ended quickly.
Several things are happening now. For one, fanboyz like Hiro are dismissing the town halls as passe, past the sell date, and unworkable and unscalable for the world and in urgent need of dumping. No doubt he has in mind creating some sanitized, filtered, voting panel or Group Social Tool Thingie that will enable everyone to...express their undying gratitude and support to Lindens throughout the day, with never a discouraging word being heard. (I use this space once again to marvel that you cannot vote "no" in the SL voting forums).
As "proof" that these town halls are raucous, rowdy, and impossible, Hiro and others cite the event the other day, where 20 avs were expected at a little pre-filtered and feted Community Round Table gathering, but then some wise Linden put the fact of the meeting on the Message of the Day and 140 avs stormed the four-corners with many more getting This Region is Full. That meant that many people with free-floating anger about the end of Dwellopers and all kinds of other issues showed up to complain. Well, great, that's what democracy is for!
The feeling of these meetings is always worse than reading the transcript after (I invite you to compare and contrast this, especially if you were there, by reading the entry about the "region full" below. People feel a lot of stress when a lot of comments scroll by, when they can't keep up with them, when people are responding and calling out. But in reality, this meeting that everyone thought was so impossible had a lot of very important things happening in it -- people raising issues that never get discussed openly like sex in SL (like the old Soviet Union, we have no sex in SL, of course...)
The Lindens used to respond by being really agressive to this and telling people in IMs separately to shut up, or telling them in public to shut up, or moderating more firmly. Given their own claims that these things are zoos, I marvel that they stopped trying to moderate them better. In fact, the Lindens are responsible for a lot of the zooey atmosphere just by not doing the work required to make a topic for the meeting, and insist people stick to it (they get busy and have no time to prepare). So lessons learned: don't hold a free-for-all no-topic meeting unless you want...a free-for-all no-topic meeting.
More and more, the Lindens are going to sequester themselves, shield themselves, and put layers of Mentors, Greeters, Helpers, and Other Assorted FIC and SIC to "manage the mob". Indeed, soon, they'll have "mob enabling technology" as Jesse touchingly called it that might prove more about mob managing technology than enabling (and I'm not sure we want to enable crowds to further their group-think).
All of this is a long-winded intro to today's illustrative lesson in faction-fighting. We had a simple thing to do the other day. I held a public meeting on the schedule. I IM'd hundreds of people in dozens of groups. We had perhaps 12-15 come, but in fact representing different of the factions, if you will, to some extent. Certainly not scientifically! We decided that the topic was so important we had to make sure it had a public hearing, with a real mechanism to hear those who had a lot at stake.
(I could interrupt here to note that the very notion of stake-holding, and the idea that some people have more stake than others in this or that issue or value, has itself been rejected in SL. Of course, now that Aimee is forming a Content Creators' Union, all that shouting and bitching about stakeholders in MJW has died away. Interesting, that.)
That is, as one way to get around the meaningless banter and idiocy and screeching that happens at these town halls as this or that person struggles to the mike, we urged that a panel be convened that would have various experts -- by which we meant *not* RL experts (I fought very hard to get that language removed from the text which crept in later when Gwyn got at it) but inworld experts. RL real estate experts are immaterial to us at this stage of our game, when we have to worry about prims or stealing of land or groups that work still with very game-like rigid mechanisms that have none of the complexity of RL -- in real life, I can't return someone else's prims or group land in the same way etc.) And it's important as I've outlined in other posts here that we make a frank admission that the putative group for which these tools are once again being pulled back and forth (like a worn blanket between a quarrelsome old couple in a bed) -- the group that distributes everything equally -- doesn't exist, except possibly in Neualtenberg, and possibly only in the brains of utopianist tekki wikis.
Honestly, I really want someone to come up with even one more example -- outside the claustrophobic confines of the Bavarian Commie Creampuff Horror -- of a group that decided as one, with, say, 10 parts, to have each of them put in $100 US to buy a sim on the auction, then each put in 1024 or whatever to hold the tier, etc. etc. I don't really think such creatures exist, and we know that, and they know that, yet they keep trying to bring them into being by nerfing tools around their utopian visions, instead of adapting the utopian vision to the realities of the virtual world as it really is taking shape.
This simple little request -- making a request to the Lindens, asking for a panel discussion, suggesting speakers, becomes a hugely contested hotbed of infighting and faction-fighting even among relatively like-minded people precisely because there is at stake now a crucial moment: whether the beta testers, charter members, basics and various other hangers-on in SL are going to accept that their utopian vision of a "lab" and its "research" and its "experiment" is coming to an end, and having to yield to a more commercialized, profit-centered, business model, or whether they are going to continue to devise means to break the backs of business people who invest in the "lab" and keep scratching their eyes out, and forcing them to leave the game sometimes, cling to their utopian vision.
And by this, I don't mean just little factions and claques and cliques of tekkies in the sandbox on their basics screaming out to the Lindens that they have to keep the Dwellopers. (The town hall has an illustrative example of people like Magnum telling everyong pompously that he has "walked around the world" (his few sims? those next door?) in Gorean land and found out that "everybody" wants the developer's incentive to stay. Or Ferrit, the furry guy (not sure what his agenda is) screaming that land barons are evil and they need to keep dwellopers etc, and that only a small faction wants to remove it.
To which I say drily, um, the small faction called "their venture capitalists at LL" or "their accountants" who watch the bottom line? Because honestly, did these basics, tekkies, sandboxers, furries, and fluries, and furies think everyone was going to just keep on subsidizing their game for ever, and ever, as Lordfly touchingly refers to it, the Heat Death of the Sun?
Hell, no.
It's time for these factions to become more articulated, more clear about what they are and represent, and to face the music about what it costs to maintain them. There are always going to be factions. And the give and take of democracy and policy-making not only tolerates factions, it requires them; indeed factions and the expression of opinions are the lifeblood of democracy. They are not to be discouraged, they are not to be dismissed as "divisive," but acknowledged, given the right forums and institutions for expressing their legitimate interests, and heeded.
What this means is that a few of the minority factions like the Platforms and tekkies and such are going to have to stop their class warfare, their dimissal of others with silly caricatures taken out of copies of Pravda from the early 1900s with Mr. Moneybags, and realize what it costs, what it means, what is entailed in running this giant and scary big server farm called Second Life.
What is means is that 20 people in Neualtenberg, or 20 people on Democracy Island, that odious new interest group in our midst that's going to style itself as convenor of others and heap more privileges on itself as a result, or 20 furries, cannot be allowed to decide how these tools will be changed. The Lindens, of course, will decide on their own anyway, likely mimicking or echoing the concerns that the 20 in Neualtenberg already fed them. Still, we who are in factions that actually have more support, even if less voice, will go on insisting that we also have some influence to meet our concerns.
Thus a post like this in which Iron Perth invokes "democracy" (the jeering of W-Hat griefers?) and the "wisdom of the crowd" (the cat-calling of hard-left furries?) as a way to keep secure his own faction (whatever that is) has to be challenged.
It's not "democracy" to overrun a panel that in fact contains people on it who in fact represent others, and not their own interests, because they manage groups within SL, voluntary, self-selected groups who formed communities or rent from private or mainland agents.
In fact to step on those experienced people and insist that we have to sit (as we were supposed to do in the Telehub Discussion group) and listen to non-land owners, and non-group managers with theories about socialism and social engineering is completely untenable.
The "wisdom of the crowd" concept has its place. Let's imagine a thoughtful NPR audience. A New England town hall. An academic lecture hall, etc. These are all places where wisdom of crowd might shine because they are pre-filtered to be like-minded.
But there isn't like-mindedness in SL. All we share is the desire to log-on. Any similitarity in views ends there for many of us. There can't be an invocation and call for Unity and Saving the World and Thinking of the Children. Instead, there has to be sane and mature awareness, recognition, and management of real differences with real consquences that have a right to exist and not be smoothed out on some tekkie voting feature that doesn't let you vote "no".
Add the names to the forum post (and they were included in the letter to Lindens). No conspiracy theory at work, just hadn't scrolled down far enough on the cut & paste!
Posted by: Justice Soothsayer | 01/11/2006 at 12:56 PM
Glad to hear it Justice, but there *is* a conspiracy theory at work, I'm afraid, and it's not about the names accidentally being cut off. You're creating the impression on the forums that you are "running this". So that Iron Perth (Democracy Island, friend of Nberg, Learnland, etc.) tells Suezanne Baskerville (Libertarians) that "Justice Soothsayer is taking care of this covenants issue".
NOT. Neither you, nor Gwyn, nor Traxx nor for that matter ME are "taking care" of this issue.
Let me put the facts on the record again.
1. Spotting the interview in the Metaverse Messenger, which had gotten little or no attention, I immediately understood that the Lindens' vague statements here and there about making group tools a priority for FQ06 was now suddenly morphing into their need to address the Laz issue and other problems and conflating it with group tools/covenants.
2. I immediately put a meeting on the public events calendar for my regularly-scheduled Sutherland Dam Club session which is always Fridays at 6, so that many people already know that those of us interested in trying to find out news on the land and economy, even if we loathe each other, can try to at least IM each other and come to the meeting at that time.
(Over the months, even people who would like to see me drawn and quartered and sold as pickles in Midnight City, like Enabran Templar, will come to these meetings just because all of us, whatever our views, need to at least get the facts straight about what these Lindens are doing -- they often don't even tell their FICs and darlings.)
3. I IM'd hundreds of people literally -- 80 percent of the people in my land groups and clubs and shopping thingers etc could care less, but for lack of any other means to get the word out to a very wide variety of people, I do it that way -- the events calendar is too spammed and the forums are read only by 5 percent of the people.
4. While in this meeting which had a varied and half-AFK attendance on Friday night, as you recall, which I felt had to undertake to represent all interested parties on this issue, even if not present (some came and left, some IM'd me etc), we delegated (we being nothing but a random collectin of interested parties) four people to draft and present concerns: Midtown, Gwyn, Cocoanut, and yourself.
This nonce group of delegatees and nonce group of delegaters represents no party, faction, institution, or group other than "those interested who came to the meeting".
5. I figured this process of delegating and getting out a letter would work just like it did the last 10 times we wrote letters on various things -- Lazarus Divine, telehubs, or what have you. But I guess working with land barons or telehub owners (not the same groups of people BTW) or Laz-infested victims is just not the same thing. It broke down.
6. From a simple request to have a simple meeting with a "panel of experts with knowledge of managing groups" i.e. me, or Hiro Queso, or those running Lusk like eltee statosky etc or Boardman like Ingrid, with a pretty straightforward "ask" to get the Lindens merely moving on a themed TH, the letter complexified.
Two elements were introduced that weren't part of the consensus -- at least, they were only what "a few or one person wanted".
a) RL experts on covenants
b) Others who manage groups even if not landed
Whatever anybody tells me about their innocent internal and publicized discussion, I see this handily as a bid to get in:
a) Whomever Neualtenberg or Thinkers could find as RL experts from communes or whatever to fill in the expertise slanted to their liking
b) To include Thinkers, which have no land, just because they Think.
Cocoanut began to object to b) -- I, however, knowing how Thinkers like Traxx always try to oar into any waters not really their own anyway just figured it was better to give them and the Lindens that option to include the non-landed Thinkers and Talkers like Democracy Island a "stake" too -- since they feel they are owed one.
Cocoanut was concerned that if that was done, then people like me who really pay tier and really get down with teh ppl deeding them videos would not get a voice. She is absoltely right. It is not inconceivable that these Lindens, left to their own devices, would do the wrong thing and not include people obviously very interested in zoning mainland communities *because they already do that*.
(Why am I so suspicious and conspiratorial? Because we have a history of them doing that. They convened a meeting on Telehubs for which they made a group to pre-clear the people in it and keep out any they didn't like. That meant only those people could come to the sim, it was put on lock and group only. This is like frisking people for Kerry t-shirts at a Bush rally.
Then, the people who came were all those like Lenin Camus or Aimee Weber who don't even own telehub land but who just wanted to run SL because they always want to run SL and show up at any party. They were allowed to talk and talk, and outraged telehub land owners who were about to lose their shirts were told to shush.
That's why I didn't legitimize that madness from the get-go and held a dissident town hall at exactly the same time, and invited Anshe Chung and others who actually lost money and actually had telehub land.
The Lindens sent over some Linden cops to see that we weren't rioting but didn't force us to disband. Jeska did, however, repost her own notice using godpowers to make sure her notice of the official telehub meeting got placed first on the events list -- it was one of those touchingly humorous SL moments for me, as I had cleverly used the old repeater method of saying "A Town Hall" or something to make mine show first.)
7. Gwyn then postured in Nberg, having her own meeting, inviting Traxx, making sure that her vision of the thing was "out there" and ours was muffled. She made no contradiction of what Traxx said, and did nothing when he posted "Gwyn's meeting" to screech about "dictators" and evil land barons taking over tools (that aren't even invented yet, BTW).
Only after I raised Cain did she post something mildly reproaching and modifying what he said -- but too little, too late.
Her calling a last-minute "public meeting" without us, and posturing on forums, managed to obliterate our concerns.
Meanwhile, using another type of Bolshevik tactic, she just stalled on signing the letter. Unfortunately Coco also stalled trying to maneuver to prevent her stalling, etc.
I insisted that the crap about RL experts be taken out. This isn't because I'm a benighted yahoo unable to "learn from my betters" in RL real estate -- I'm no more a RL real estate agent than Jeff Brown is a Railroad Tycoon or Peter Ludlow is a Newspaper Editor, right?
But this is Second Life where in fact RL real estate experience might not serve you so well given all the game features and exigencies and populations, etc.
8. You then not only posted on the forums without signatures, to further obliterate this hard-won text (of course it's all silly, but see the factions that hide behind a simple phrase), you then made it seem like this was an issue that you are "leading" on when in fact you are merely a guy on the Internet, who showed up at a meeting on a calendar.
I'm going into excruciating painful detail here to get you to realize how things really become impossible to manage in this hall of mirrors of a virtual world unless you really proceed from trust and good faith.
Calling meetings behind others' backs and not inviting them is bad faith. Posturing on the forums is bad faith. If you are busy and forgot, then allowing one very strong person to put his version of the story and his views on the forums as if they are Gospel is also bad faith. To let all that become what shapes the forum concept of covenants and hence becomes the echo chamber for the Lindens (unfortunately) is not just bad faith, it's the worst kind of bad action.
That's why I acted as strongly and swiftly as I could, even sacrificing a gift of 512 tier, to make the point: don't do that. This is too important, and we have too much at stake here, for any faction to be pulling crap like that and stunts like that to mount their own hobby horses and capture their own Lindens.
Since that time Robin has clarified to Forseti (as he recounted in my OPEN PUBLIC MEETING last night that she believes group tools and covenanting are separate tracks. Yet Philip put them together. It is not uncommon for one Linden hand not to know what the other is doing, but I think that on something this important, they are on the same page -- but with different pieces of the elephant.
I can only implore all those interested in this topic to please try to create a process to at least adjudicate fairly and present fairly a range of opinion to the Lindens. (Yes, I'm mindful that the Lindens will do what they want anyway, having already listened to their selected faction.)
I realize that Gwyn firmly believes that the Lindens are just going to do what she says anyway -- because she's gotten really hugely skilled at sussing out and saying what they're going to do anyway herself to make it look like she's five minutes before her time.
But I think it's really important for Gwyn, who is not an expert on group land to shut up and listen to people who really have to struggle with this stuff in a really serious and real way(renting from Sudane's alt on a private island, and being my former tenant, does not make her one : )
I have no idea if Iron Perth owns land, but Traxx' understanding of group land comes from:
a) his very first group where he reigned supreme, took tier from me and my alts, and did not put the land on "create/edit" so that I couldn't build. Imagine! I couldn't even put out a prim on land that I paid tier for!
So..sure...Traxx is right to worry about covenanting group leaders who make groups like THIS that are tyrannical!
b) his second land group in which he paid *not a drop of money or a drop of tier despite having alts with 512s on them* but put up a fabulous build -- which wasn't such a present at the end of the day because he deleted it one fell swoop during a tantrum.
c) his third land group in which he also deleted a build in a tantrum.
3) his fourth land group in which he and his alts took turns jacking up the dwell.
4) his fifth land group in which he, his alts, and a business partner and alts are building something that might be called a public building, but which is a vanity showcase for his builds and their contracting business.
Meanwhile, I have 400 people in a dozen groups on parts of 40 sims I'm trying to keep happy.
Let me suggest that this is a vastly different order of experience and concern than anyone else signing this letter.
I am not a land baron and do not make some huge profit -- I'm lucky if I break even. But even if I did buy a Porsche from my land baroning, it would be right and proper because it's expense and work.
I'm really about to tear out my hair with all you folks who believe that it's ok to prototype and fantasize and create utopias at the expense of other people who pay the bills.
Buy your own damn servers. Make your own damn projects.
Justice, I'm sorry, but you were unwilling to pay $40 or $75 yourself for 8192 or 16k plus, and you are -- what -- squatting? erm..renting for free on Democracy Island?
I hate to be so brutish about this, but all early societies start with small-holders. You are not one.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/11/2006 at 01:45 PM
Well,
(a) I am not in the land business and have no desire to hear myself on a panel talking about land zoning tools, and thus no desire to hear any others who aren't involved in it, either.
(b) Regardless of what a panel is about, I have no desire to hear from rl experts, because rl is nothing the same as SL. I'm not in SL to be taught by anybody. If they don't play SL, then I don't care what they think.
(c) I stalled on signing that letter which is now in the forums because despite my objections, it still had clauses in it that could mean "anybody and everybody we decide to let on the panel will be on it," the "we" being whoever is most skilled at manipulating things like this.
I wanted to hear from LAND people on zoning tools, not from professors or would-be society-builders or any other pontificators with no real experience in SL land, and not from people with various political ideologies,to get things arranged to their satisfaction, unless they also deal with land on a large scale in SL.
I wanted to talk about zoning, and I wanted to hear, on a panel, from those involved in running these lands and communities, and then a Linden who knows what he/she is talking about - not six Lindens who just happen to have the time to attend, and keep saying, "ask so-and-so" and other brush-off tactics, after which they can feel satisfied they have brushed off the whole thing and can now relax.
And after the panelist spoke, and the Linden panelists spoke, and the audience has heard all these plans and considerations, with a knowledgable Linden providing knowledgable input, then the audience could get in on it with free discussion.
I thought this panel format, which was suggested by Justice, was a good plan, and a practical one. To have it co-opted into "who we want" doesn't please me.
Nonetheless, I signed it, and maybe we can actually get something practical done that we need via this proposed town hall.
(d) I liked the fact that the letter wasn't signed on the forums. I don't care if it looked like Justice was running the whole thing. Because you know perfectly well that if my name is on something, 36 people are then going to be automatically against it. I could put my name on something calling for babies to be fed, and 36 people would spout off endlessly about why letting babies starve is actually the better option.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | 01/11/2006 at 03:25 PM
i dotn see any problems to exclude prok from any important discussions LL might have, after all , you are someone very special prok, so you need a special treatment ^_^
Posted by: Kyrah Abattoir | 01/11/2006 at 03:33 PM
P.S. Just thinking - if your problem with Justice is that he would be on the panel, I don't think he should be, and it never occured to me he would be. However, if he is in this just as I am - as a non-expert and non-panelist - then there is no problem with that.
Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | 01/11/2006 at 03:40 PM
P.S. Correction to first post: "After the panelists spoke, and the Linden panelists spoke" should read "Linden panelist (singular) spoke."
Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | 01/11/2006 at 03:42 PM
LOL but Coco, this is how the game of SL is played: "anybody and everybody we decide to let on the panel will be on it," the "we" being whoever is most skilled at manipulating things like this."
I totally agree, but of course the Lindens organize these events, not us.
Which gives me an idea. Why keep having them organize it? We should just organize our own panel discussion. I have to say, the times I've done that, and gotten speakers and announced the event well in advance, I've gotten good attendance. Regardless of what the Lindens and the SIC do, let's just organize our own event but plan it so that it has plenty of notice and participation. I think that's going to be necessary -- and then invite a Linden.
I've urged the Lindens to hold focus groups with different communities for a long time but they don't want to open themselves up to that much participation because it means intense pressure and their inability to say yes -- or no, of that matter. "We'll look into that...we're all about giving residents the tools to blah blah."
Imagine if the Lindens had a traveling Listen Linden who went around to the furries or Goreans or 10 First Land Patches and listened to what people had to say. So if they won't do that, we should just do it for them, here and there where somebody wants to do it.
My problem with Justice (or Gwyn) is NOT that I wanted them on the panel. I suppose arguably, once again, tired as it may be, as irrelevant to the rest of it as it may be, we have to have the Socialism-in-On-Sim stuff again on a panel and have Gwyn speak to their (tiresome) experiences. Justice has no experiences that are relevant and I don't even he suggests residents should nominate him to a panel.
I agree with what you're saying Coco, it's just that in the politics of SL, you have to make tactical compromises like putting this or that person on a panel.
When we talked about "groups interested in tools" that was merely a tactical concession to make sure Gwyn or Traxx or whomever stopped plotting behind the scenes so that they could just have their say on the panel without having to be devious. I really don't care what the experience is of a landless group that talks is, or thinks, when I have to *do* every day. If they had built up some credibility as a reputable think tank, as people who actually convened meetings that really provided authentic participatory discussion, I might think differently.
But Thinkers has always been literally and figuratively a hostage of Nberg, physically there, and run by most of the Nberg regulars or hangers-on. The fact that a Randian (or whatever you'd call him) like Traxx would still be rezzing himself around a socialist enclave like Thinkers, when he purports to be capitalist (at least pro-business-my-business) or rather probably mercantilist, says it all: for want of better organization or Linden encouragement, Thinkers have held the stage.
It's folly for us to decide things like "let's have only one Linden and make sure they aren't dufuses" because Lindens don't care about stuff like that, and tend to travel in groups for safety, and do what they want.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/11/2006 at 06:34 PM
more ignorant and ill informed blather from Mr. neva.
Posted by: Kendra Bancroft | 01/11/2006 at 06:44 PM
Kendra, Kendra, Kendra. Bitter, are we, now that all our beautiful wickedness is melting?
I'm thinking your "stepping down from a position of authority" in Nberg just means, oh, like the post=coup period in Russia where the name tags on the doors changed but the people were still the same, or the same people were really still running stuff.
So if it is ignorant and ill=informed, enlighten us.
If ignorant and ill-informed, then you have bad PR and too many closed meetings of the sort where you tell people at the last minute.
I never did understand why Thinkers holds most of its meetings in Nberg. I always thought that was unseemly. Of course Neal has them at his zen thing and Traxx would have them anywhere to put dwell in his pot but the default is Nberg. And I believe Thinking should not just be in the commie Bolshie vein, you know?
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/11/2006 at 10:10 PM
In regards to a group working towards shared support of a sim, see here (proposed island funding model for InnerLife):
http://gaeacoop.org/cgi-bin/InnerLife/forum.cgi?op=view_thread;board=funding;thread=22
It's not been updated recently, but in the end they are sharing my 1/4 sim in Tavaura for experiments (which appear to have fallen short of expectations, and discussion of other platforms than SL has started).
Note the thread references a second group that has also done something like that - 20 people paying US$55 initial each and say US$10 monthly for a part of the island. So one group is still doing this, and another has considered it as viable (and relatively inexpensive) option.
--Alan (www.sungak.net)
PS: Going over this post I realize you're still holding the Friday meets after all. And you're more than welcome to IM me for discussions similar to what you were trying to initiate, I'd have been there sooner.
Posted by: Alan_Kiesler | 01/12/2006 at 05:28 AM
Thanks so much for reminding me of your project, Alan. I remember you describing it in the Friday night meetings but I thought it had been discontinued. I had no idea that it survived.
Would it be fair to say, however, that you didn't go into it with any kind of idealogy of socialism or social democracy or creating a government or city replica? That's what Nberg is doing, and given that they have that sort of ideology to start with, they're eager to seek validation by having the group tools reform go their way, but there has to be recognition that this recipe of "socialist-equal-parts and "equal distribution" is utopian, unworkable, impractical, and not an actuality for even those who share.
It sounds to me like you pooled your efforts -- but once again, I'm shown to be correct by calling this effort one principled, strong-willed (or at least determined) person who calls it "my sim" and calls what the others do "sharing my sim".
That tells you a lot!
Do you see my point?
Did you put up the purchase price, or did you divide it equally? Did y ou plan that in advance? Did you pay most of the tier, and search for partners, or did all people share equally?
Do you see what I mean? Over and over again, what happens is that one person puts up the investment, the time, the effort, the money, and then *finds people to share* but it is not some kind of utopian cut-up in equal parts. And that's why I want to make sure that any tools developed do not enable those "sim-sharers" to do ANYTHING that would part YOU from your sim that YOU paid for from the outset -- and perhaps still did not make back the cost on.
I'm glad there is also yet more groups doing this. I can only welcome them. My purpose is not to will them out of existence or nerf tools away from them (which is what they do to us). My purpose is to make sure that no one *misrepresents* what they are as these utopian cooperative projects -- which are a distinct rarety -- and more to the point, that they do not *assume they are the norm based on wishful thinking and then nerf the tools around them, harming other kinds of structures*.
Are you following me? This is very important.
Remember, I'm NOT opposed to this sim-sharing. I'm the one who got on the forums (as Random Unsung) months ago, and said, plaintively, "Why Don't People Pool Tier?" I figured if people could only get together in groups of 2, 3, 10, 20, they could break the back of the costs, and stop the blighting up and wreckage of sims. I was astounded that given at least adequate group tools nobody did the obvious thing and got 10 people together as newbs to share their 512 after they sold their first land.
It's effort to do this, and doesn't happen always unless people have a "quest" or an "ideology". But I think more and more people will do it. I WANT them to be facilitated in doing that -- that's what I initially brought up in the forums months ago (and was only viciously slammed by Jauani and others who claimed I was tier-scamming). I'd do a lot more of this if it weren't for people like Jauani impugning my motives and libeling me. It makes it very hard to keep going, each time you make a call for tier donations and 2-3 oldbies get on the classifieds even and slam you all to hell and call you a scammer. There's no scamming involved in this program, and it's insanity to call such cooperation anything like that.
It's what socialists do when they see others cooperating and sharing *without* their ideology. *They hate that*.
I'm also aware of Dennis Albion's project where he bought some land, then invited 10 or 12 people to come in and pay tier. It was knocked in the forums by the usual suspects who accused him (like Juro Kothari) stubbornly and nastily of "scamming tier" or "leveraging other people's tier".
There isn't any evidence of that, Dennis appears to be in good faith, and in fact it's a good thing people ignored the forums royals and pooled with this vigorous new entrepreneur. The problem with his set-up is he seems to have no notecarded info or more automated process to make this effort more trustworthy and it seems to rely on lots of f2f convos etc to make it stick. But he has a visible build, plans, and rentals and in theory, something could come of it -- if nothing else, people get the dwell.
That's SO different than people who come on the forums and say "Somebody buy me a sim and let's all share it I have a great plan for a zoned community" -- remember when someone with the appropriately named avatar of "Lefty" did that? I can only tell all such lefties that they can go pay for their own sims, I have enough "sharing" thanks.
I also saw that Salazar Jack called for a barn-raiser the other day and urged 10 good men and women to put in 512 to help him over one of those awful double-tier situations where the Lindens whack hard and do nothing to help (moving accounts, moving tier off acounts, and you are stuck with dates that don't work and doubling up).
He succeeded in tiding his group over that rough patch and avoiding the double tier at least for himself, by spreading it 10 ways at least to people who had only 512 free and didn't mind.
There should be TONS MORE of this stuff in SL. TONS MORE. And the fact that there isn't, isn't just a function of the group tools being bad, it's a function of vicious forums royals raging at people innocently trying to start this cooperative effort (like myself and others) and their jealousy of people working in this way without a hugely bonded/quested/shared beta experience trust factor under their belts.
Like I said, they do this because *they hate to see people creating communities WITHOUT their ideologies; they want their power-taking ideologies to have sole claim to the concept of cooperation*.
The Friday night meetings happen almost every Friday at 6. If you don't want to watch the calendar, join the group Doers on open enrollment to get messages about the meetings and reminders. It's hard to keep a separate record of everyone who wants to come and remind them individually. So if you're out of groups, maybe just watch the calendar or look on fridays at 6 anyway.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/12/2006 at 06:39 AM
Afternoon.
My parcel in Tavarua is an island rental, which I moved to around 1/3/05 (note that predates island deeding). Many confuse me as the owner as I've been there so long and helped the actual owner to keep the four parcels 'in use.' :)
I'm also not in charge of InnerLife, only the land sponsor (look at the group, I'm not an Officer of the actual group, only the land-holding one). I only got involved around March or so when I went to one of Carlos's Mandala events. Amazing project really, unfortunately the Lightstone device does not like me. :(
The rental parcel was split slightly and the second half re-deeded around mid-April I think (around the GDC submission deadline); The offer was they could have some land I was not using in return for a small L$ monthly to me (honestly, I'm not picky about that - and I don't 'cash out' but use the L$ to help support others). I would continue to deal directly with the 'Realtor' on behalf of both land-holding groups (for which I'm officer), to make things easier on him.
I was one of the first to flee the 'sinking ship' of the mainland, long before any of the mess of the past year came to pass. Though my needs were simple - privacy and stability. I got those, and its been worth every penny of the cost.
Unfortunately, you reminded me that I forgot to donate to Salazar's group. I'm still a Premium (I'm holding a different island for a group atm) but the included 512 is going to waste. Plus, he's a fellow Urufugee. ;) Still, good to hear that it turned out OK.
I think you can create communities while not worrying about the consequences. Or giving a damn about outside influences (sans LL themselves of course). I do understand your concerns, some of them resonate with me for the sake of the projects I help sponsor.
I think though that the communities that work best are probably the ones that will generate the insular fragmentation that Gwyneth warns about regarding point-to-point TP. That fragmentation was already occuring back when I joined mid-2004; I'm more sensitive to these things since it looked alot like the fragmentation going on during Uru Prologue and the introduction of the DRC and the RPG element to the game. I personally think its inevitable - but that does not mean that some form of representation cannot exist in SL.
But that's material for my own weblog post, sometime this weekend I hope. Will Trackback when done (need to assemble several actually).
--Alan
Posted by: Alan_Kiesler | 01/12/2006 at 03:23 PM