Likewise, I’ve never been to any of the Democratic Simulators, and would love to visit.

We’d be delighted to undertake the logistics to host a meeting of community organizers, or to support anyone else who’d like to do so!

one of the purposes of the Metaverse Republic is precisely to make democracy (and workable multi-person governance generally) a more feasible option for small communities than it is at present :-)

Now that there are several communities experimenting with democratic forms of self-governance across the grid perhaps we should try to share information on the challenges and ideas for how to overcome them? On a longer time scale we could perhaps also explore the kind of demands we might make of Linden Labs in order to make democracy a more feasible option (the current set of tools seems to promote ‘enlightened despotism’ as the default mode of government!)

Sophrosyne – I plan to visit your sims in the next day or so, please come and see us in Neufreistadt, Colonia Nova and Alpine Meadow if you haven’t visited before.

Regards, Patroklus Murakami
Leader of the Representative Assembly
Confederation of Democratic Simulators

This Saturday, 12/22, we’re throwing a 12 hour Solstice Party, 9am-9pm SLT- all welcome!

Sophrosyne, can I ask you if the inspiration for the hexagons-on-the-sea layout was inspired by Oceania — The Atlantis Project, also a libertarian community, that never managed to raise enough funds to be built in real life, but still got some buzz back in 1993/4?

there is no point in having any institutions of government at all unless they are capable of working. It does not make any sense to say, “the environment does not allow us to have effective governments, therefore we will have a government anyway, but not have proper judicial institutions“. Either there is no point in having any kind of government at all, or there is a point, and there is every reason to do it properly in every respect.

I take the point that you made earlier about truly tiny communities (small enough for everybody to know everybody else, or, at the very least, virtually everybody else personally) not needing formal institutions, but, once one passes that minimum size, to the extent to which it is worthwhile having a governance system of any kind at all, it is worth having one including a proper judicial system and the rule of law to full effect.

In fact, the situation is not as bleak as you imagine it as regards enforcement. At the Metaverse Republic, to which I referred you earlier, we are working on a system whereby anyone who disobeys a court order can be banned automatically from a very large number of subscribing sims (those who subscribe, in return, get the right to vote in elections to our parliament which will be able to pass laws binding on our courts, thus incentivising mass subscription). That will hopefully provide the intermediate layer that you correctly identify is needed.

The TOS give absolute authority to LL, authority which they almost completely choose not to exercise. Even so, they have one power only: the termination of an account. This is both too much and too little a penalty for offenses: too much, in that it could represent a loss of thousands of $USD to an established resident, too little in that it does nothing to prevent a greifer from logging back on with a new free account.

What happens when a party using our dispute resolution service fails to comply with a decision? What powers we hold are essentially feudal – LL’s power on the scale of the SIMs we own. And by “we,” I mean Galatea Gynoid, the person financially liable to LL for all Extropian territory.

If the person is a Citizen of Extropia, “we” can refund their deposit (less a “pest control” surcharge, I’d hope!) and ban them from Extropian SIMs. There are no police powers, no jails, no judicial liens for fines. We simply have the powers of tribal communities from time immemorial: shaming and banning.

Within the community, those can be powerful. In a mass society, they’ve got a negligible impact. But until the communities of synthetic worlds have more and better tools to enforce norms, good sense backed with the ban stick is the best we can manage –

– to the best of my knowledge, at least. If there are other tools, if anyone has experience with effective problem-solving methods we’ve overlooked, we’re very eager to hear about them, and to learn from you!