Many of you may be interested in joining a new group that I have created in-world called the "Local Government Study Group". Its group charter is as follows:

I have devised the following outline plan of the group's activities:

We are currently in phase 1, with the emphasis on recruitment. We alerady have a considerable number of members, including well-known figures such as Desmond Shang, Random Cole, katykiwi Moonflower, Frank Koolhaas, Tom Bukowski, Sudane Erato, and SLNN journalist Redakisto Noble.

Enrolment is free of charge and open. I plan to have the first social meeting either shortly before or shortly after Christmas.

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Ashcroft Burnham

"We do not permit a man to rule, but the law" (Aristotle).

As I stated in the group in world, I plan to fight this effort to impose sectarian beliefs on others.

I think we need to really fight to keep SL free.

I don't think any one group gets to impose on the Lindens their view of how the system-wide tools should be, under the guise of technicalities imposing various sectarian world views.

Have fun :-) Meanwhile, in the world of the non-delusionally paranoid, you, and anyone else, can (as, indeed, you have), join the group and contribute to the ideas about developing government tools.

Free from... new tools? Or from the paranoid?

Last time I checked, there was a difference between persuasion and imposition. Maybe your dictionary differs from mine in that respect.

However, I'd be fascinated to know what delightful flights of fancy that your paranoid mind has conjured up this time; what particular sectarian views do you think that anybody is trying to impose by persuading Linden Lab to make it easier for people to have governments, and choose to which government to belong?

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Ashcroft Burnham

"We do not permit a man to rule, but the law" (Aristotle).

How about this: I don't want to belong to ANY government.

Most particularly not yours.

coco

That's fine. The government tools that I am imagining at this stage involve giving everybody the choice as to whether to belong to a government or not. "Anarchy" will be an option.

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Ashcroft Burnham

"We do not permit a man to rule, but the law" (Aristotle).

Prokofy - you 'blogged about my Study Group - I am extremely grateful for all the free publicity. I didn't know that you cared :-)

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Ashcroft Burnham

"We do not permit a man to rule, but the law" (Aristotle).

Well Ashcroft, it might surprise you, but Prokofy does indeed care about these things, quite a bit. He's also willing to spend lots of his time and energy towards making a project work.

Sadly, however, he's as strong as spending his time and energy to destroy a project he hasn't been part of it from the very beginning

Achieving a good compromise will be a daunting task...

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The topic fascinates me, and I must confess being more interested in 'avatar rights' than a possible governance or justice system.

If anything, I'd hope my presence would be a cooperative 'emergency brake' - as I'm most mindful of things that should *never* be implemented.

It might be very subtle, too. For instance - the issue of a 'note' on a ban list stating offence has come up.

Honestly, I'm against that. There are no 'fair trials' - should someone end up on a universal ban list, the 'note' describing them will be quite damning, regardless of truth.

Details - it's where the devil is.

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- Desmond Shang


Steampunk Victorian, Well-Mannered Caledon: secondlife://caledon/190/190
West Trade Imports LTD Architecture & Antiques: secondlife://alice/89/114

Oh, Desmond, why aren't there "fair trials"?

All it takes for a trial to be fair is a few simple things:

1. Rules are defined (and changed) by the community that lives under them (ie. not imposed from "above").
2. Judges/Mediators are selected (or un-selected) through a process established by those very same rules.
3. There is always a way to make an appeal.
4. The people choosing the rules for their community have a way to validate that the trial was conducted under those very same rules.

That way, you can wholly separate the concept of "fair judges" (ie. the people) from a "fair trial" (ie. the process). The "details" should focus on that. A bad system with very good judges/mediators will work somewhat, but it's dependent on the trust of everybody on the person acting as judge/mediator, or on the power that person has (Example: do we trust Linden Lab's Abuse Report Team? Well, probably not, but they have the power to enforce their rules). A good system can survive even with bad judges and "unfair" trials simply because these can be validated by the very same people who have set up the rules in the first place ? and re-appoint the judge/moderator, appeal the decision, or simply change the rules.

The "details" here are simply how to design a system which is not dependent of the "fairness" of the people to be successful. Ashcroft's Aristotle quote on his signature points the way

Of course, if what we have is a group of people setting some rules, and imposing them (by force or reputation) upon others (ie. autocratic/oligarchic rule, the norm in Second Life) who have no way to validate those rules or the whole process, and without a chance to appeal, there is no way that such a system might lead to "fair trials". If it does, it's by mere chance ? and relying totally about the moral integrity of the people "running the system". There is no fair and impartial justice under autocracies ? only systems that by luck, chance, and special people, might be able to show a degree of fairness. Sometimes.

As to "avatar rights" I'm always reminded of the long-winded discussions between Prokofy and Raph Kostner. It seems that people like Raph fail totally to understand that it's not about avatar rights, but human rights. His incredibly shabby "Bill of Avatar Rights" violate the spirit and the letter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Some of those universal rights, he claims, "simply don't apply to synthetic worlds" and are "unnecessary".

I find such claims shocking. This would mean, for instance, that one day people like Raph could claim that people on the phone, since they don't interact physically in the world, would not require all human rights at all, but just a subset that applies to the cyberspace of telephoning. If you address anyone in the world stating that claim, people would look at you if you were mad. "But there are no people behind a phone, they're just a number!" you might claim. They would be really thinking you were insane. Clearly, after 150 years of telephone service, we obviously don't think that the disembodied voice on the other side of a speaker with a number attached to it is nothing but a real person using a communication medium ? a low-bandwidth one, with limited interactivity.

Jump to synthetic worlds, and people now seem to forget the lessons about the telephone system (or the snail mail system that predates it...). Suddenly, avatars in virtual worlds are "less" than human beings. Still worth "protecting", but not as much. Why? What is the conceptual, rational reasoning for claiming that the interaction in a synthetic world is anything but the interaction of human beings? Role-playing is also done on the phone ? think about the "hot phone XXX" lines ? and people don't lose their rights just by using it. Why should they be disenfranchised when interacting through the Metaverse?

But it seems that this notion is really popular among academicians.

Prokofy, Ashcroft, and myself disagree about many, many issues ? too long to enumerate them all ? but I think that all three of us can agree on one thing: avatars are nothing more and nothing else that "phone numbers" in the Metaverse ? what matters is the people behind it, and people get dealt fairness inside synthetic worlds like they get it everywhere else. There is no difference ? people are people, no matter if their representation is a phone number, an email adddress, a nickname, or an avatar. Thus, models of "dealing fairness" in the real world still apply to synthetic worlds. It's up to us ? the residents ? to apply the ones that worked successfully at all stages of human development, or to reject them, but if we do reject them, at least we should be aware of what that entails: falling back to the anarchy of pre-democratic societies and suffering the consequences.

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And yet, for all his shocking opinions, Raph Koster is a much lower threat to my enjoyment of SL than you government roleplayers getting any real kind of sway with LL.

If this rubbish becomes reality at least I can hole up in my island with one of Eata's assault rifles and a coldroom full of tinned prims.

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