Best of luck!

So long as the following is in place, I’m happy:

1) Free access to the policy-making decisions with the Lindens by anyone who wants to have that access; the model we know that works best is simply to elect them out of all the population, but I’ll be willing to be persuaded by any alternatives that work as well as general elections
2) Transparently set agendas. All residents should have the right to know what’s being discussed with the Lindens and by whom.
3) Public scrutiny. All discussions and decisions to be publicly available, and allowing freedom of expression to debate and criticise those discussions and decisions. The current model doesn’t even allow for public scrutiny because we don’t know who decides what!

The rest, to be honest, are mostly details.

Also note that people always misread me and believe I somehow want to “supress” LL and Lindens and replace them by a body of residents who will arbitrarily set “laws” and “rules” to constrain others to think or behave in a pre-ordained way — and arbitrarily remove their right to do whatever they wish on their own land. That’s definitely *not* something I subscribe to. On the other hand, participating in LL’s policy-making decision process is definitely something which I would love to see residents more involved — in a transparent and democratic way.

It might all become a moot point. Eventually, Second Life will drop its garden walls and allow people to hypergrid in and out to other grids. Each grid can decide on its own how it will govern itself, and will have every tool available to grid owners to do just that — namely, all the tools currently reserved to the Lindens in Second Life, plus as many others as OpenSim developers and grid owners can invent.

A parallel would be complaints about how AOL managed its forums back in its heyday. Maybe people are still complaining — who knows? — but anyone who has a problem can move over to a different forum site, or start their own.

– Maria

But I hasten to say precisely because you unabashedly describe yourself as a “progressive” (I most definitely *don’t* like that term and describe myself as “liberal but not progressive” for that reason) that I don’t think this informal system is viable for real life. That is, I don’t think we need something “new” or “special” because it’s “the 21st century” that involves basically a lot of geeks running things by fiat from their smart phones bypassing elected representatives.

There are a lot of groups like moveon.org that would love if life ran that way, where they could just buy a CREDO phone and fast-track their policy into notions. But no thank you. You’re not elected.

You have only to study what happened to the obscene-Twitterer Anthony Weinstein, a Democrat, who lost his seat to a Republican, to understand the people change, issues change, certain forces come to the fore, life goes on, and you need responsible and *elected* politicians for government, not just people with smart phones.

By suggesting governance in *Second Life* should be “a verb not a noun” I’m trying to solve the problem of an illegitimate power in the first place.

That is, sure, a private company that put their own money in gets to decide what it wants to do — on my sim level, that works for me, too, as Ravenglass. (Gwyn used to call me a “tyrant” merely because I ran *a company* instead of a “parliament” and because I had “customers” instead of “constituents”. That was ridiculous because I set the goals as limited — you pay, you abide by a notecard of rules, then you refund if you don’t like it any more.)

Government by notecard and refund works great for me, and I’ve often said you only need two scripts to run things really in SL — “give notecard” and “take notecard” — if you have consensus to start with.

And that’s really the issue, identifying the initial group of consensus. Chilbo works as you yourself explain because it is like-minded people on a like-minded task. You have the tekkie-wiki edu-punk open-source technocommies in a huddle, and they get along.

But I don’t endorse their politics or prescriptions, i.e. over-reliance on freebies, etc. etc. So the “noun” of Chilbo is not something I want to support, belong to, or confederate with, even though some of the “verbs” of Chilbo, like the idea to be able to remove “grief prims” is an interesting thesis.

I’ve discussed it many times — can the Lindens give us estate-manager powers on Governor Linden land, since it’s all basically in a few groups? There should be no reason why they can’t. If I’ve paid tier for 7 years, can’t the Lindens deputize me to remove screaming particle spewers from either Linden Land or no-show land or ban people from infohubs?

But these are all acts that seem straightforward, until griefers begin to fret and Fisk and edge-case them and demand equal rights and harry the Lindens to death, on the one hand, or until just the ordinary person wonders if any of these land barons are going to get too heavy handed in the welcome areas if they have that power. (And I still think welcome areas should be policed by clearly-marked circuit-riding Lindens only).