Newsletter Posted In-world
Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 5:46 PM by: Jeska LindenExtra, extra read all about Second Life! View the latest Second Life newsletter on our website or grab a newly updated copy from one of our in-world location and sign up for automatic in-world delivery of upcoming issues.
This month, catch up with Claudia Linden on the Teen Grid, read all about Infinite Vision’s in-world development with Dell, and discover the next steps on the road to self governance in Second Life.
Please note, we will no longer be emailing the newsletter, but will instead continue to improve the online and in-world versions for everyone to enjoy. Have suggestions? Email them to the editor.
December 22nd, 2006 at 10:31 PM
suggestion- i think you should still send out emails, even if it’s just a reminder that the newsletter was published. if someone isnt active, they can sort of forget about SL for a while and this can provide a means of bringing them back…
December 22nd, 2006 at 10:35 PM
“But when it comes to deciding what behavior should be allowed in a particular place or social group, those rules and their enforcement will be decided by the people involved—those who understand the context of the situation and have a stake in its outcome.”
is read as:
“We don’t really care to actually have a set of balls and grow a set of balls and get some teeth, so we are going to turn it over to the residents”
hmm, I wonder when asshole powerbrokers like anshe “my racketeering business started on my knees” chung, jimbo spinnaker, etc use this to their full advantage and discriminate against people from coming onto their lands who don’t meet their “qualifications”
December 23rd, 2006 at 2:01 AM
Right. So trial by jury in the USA means that the government doesn’t have any balls for dealing with criminals and is leaving it up to the citizens? Get a clue, moron. They’re trying to do something to make it so that we have the ability to handle our problems with SL “criminals” without having to “run home to mama Linden.”
December 23rd, 2006 at 2:24 AM
The key difference here is SL residents & resident organisations have no teeth.
December 23rd, 2006 at 3:26 AM
Glad to hear about the latest issue! But it would be great if there was a way to subscribe via RSS. Are there any plans to introduce that?
December 23rd, 2006 at 5:20 AM
How about publishing an RSS feed for the newsletter? That way people can still subscribe without you having to email it out.
December 23rd, 2006 at 7:33 AM
This is great, but if the newsletter was posted in world, why was the announcement posted out here? LOL
December 23rd, 2006 at 8:10 AM
It must be the season to be jolly, for there to be all this ill-informed vitriol splashing around here. If the residents have no teeth, then why all the complaints about - ohh, just off the top of my head, say… 1) greifing 2) banning 3) closed access parcels 4) religious cults old and new, 5) rip-offs… the list isn’t quite endless but it does form a comprehensive refutation of the attitudes here.
December 23rd, 2006 at 8:55 AM
Second Life has some interesting parallels to colonization of the old days.
As a new community(SL, or the Americas) grows separate and away from its parent governing body(Real Life Law and Linden Labs, or the monarchy), it becomes increasingly difficult to dedicate the resources and manpower to properly enforce the wills of that parent governing body.
Eventually, for such ‘new societies’ to really work and take on a life of their own, they need to develop their own systems of law and government. Long-distance government has never been very successful, especially as a community becomes more and more detached from that government.
Linden Labs on its own cannot feasibly govern a ‘free’ community. The difficulties and costs of maintaining a free community is substantially higher than the sort of governance that goes on in most corners of the web, which are pretty totalitarian and despotic in nature(follow a strict set of rules or face stringent punishment). It’s easy enough to be cold and strict with a detailed set of rules, but Second Life is about freedom. I think we’d be preventing SL from blossoming into something really valuable and important to the entire world if we put everything in the hands of Linden Labs.
If you ask me, we are astoundingly lucky to have Second Life run by a group of such idealistic and open-minded individuals as to encourage and nurture a free, self-governing society in a world where they could, if they wanted, enforce strict rules of behavior and conduct regardless of what we think about them.
The transition won’t be easy, but it’s necessary and important that we do so.
December 23rd, 2006 at 9:11 AM
@Stephen Zenith
“How about publishing an RSS feed for the newsletter? That way people can still subscribe without you having to email it out.”
That is precisely what we’re going to do. Our web devs are working on it, and we’ll let you all know when it is ready.
December 23rd, 2006 at 9:12 AM
On another note, I find myself thinking that communities are somewhat limited in potential due to the way that land is developed. Since we can teleport everywhere in the blink of an eye, and fly from place to place in comparatively tiny periods of time to what it would take in real life, the urge to really band together into tight-knit communities is somewhat degraded.
People do still form communities, but they tend to be spread out around the grid rather than concentrated into one area, which makes community standards sort of hard to enforce. The only way this is really going to work is within sims or large groupings of land owned by various members of the community. The prior happens more than the latter, and in the case of sims, the owners tend to have final say, not the ‘community.’ The latter does happen, but rarely due to the nature of land ownership.
If there were easier ways to group the land holdings of communities together(both physically and conceptually), either due to zoning or perhaps some manner of simple land-trading system, I think it would be much easier(and much more natural) for communities to develop together and form their own governance. As it stands, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for a community that’s spread around the grid into a dozen or more parcels, to bother setting up a system of rules.
Any community standards developed will tend to gravitate around one sim, or one club, or one parcel of land that everyone tends to congregate around, leaving any other land holdings basically without any structural benefit. In fact, it’s more likely that those separate land holdings will be subject to the rules and standards of someone else(a land baron, perhaps).
Anyway, just some thoughts. I’m not sure how feasible any of this is; It’d be nice if it were easier for communities to gather land together without having to necessarily rent a sim to themselves, which puts governance rather indisputably in the hands of one or two community members.
December 23rd, 2006 at 9:51 AM
If you set up the RSS feed with Feedburner, it will be much easier for people to add your feed to their reader of choice, and there is also the option to offer an e-mailed version of your feed. Best of both worlds!
December 23rd, 2006 at 10:25 AM
Wow, I’d like to read that newsletter…if I could connect at all.
December 23rd, 2006 at 12:40 PM
How about notifying people that the newsletter is out, sometime sooner than 11 days before it was actually released? Why not notif people it’s released, right after you release it?
Just a stupid thought.
December 23rd, 2006 at 1:42 PM
IMHO, patience, tolerance, consideration, effective communication and trust in the positive intent of fellow in-world citizens goes a long way in resolving disputes. I know because I have violated each of the above and learned to regret it in the end run.
I’d rather see self-governance rather than LL dictating life in this world that they have created, yet wisely chosen to move toward self governance. Let the people speak with equal weight regardless of SL business status, religious or political affiliation, etc.. What you own or how long you have been in-world should have no weight. LL should play the role of facilitator to move self governance along.
December 23rd, 2006 at 6:08 PM
What is a RSS feed?
December 23rd, 2006 at 6:23 PM
I’m glad you are moving away from the “Community Standards”. I never liked the restrictions on free speech they included. I’m not a racist, and you won’t see swastika or KKK symbols coming up on my land, but I value the freedom to express all views, no matter how unpopular they are.
This is a big move to make SL more of an open platform like the web. True tolerance is tolerating even ideas you find repugnant.
December 23rd, 2006 at 6:58 PM
Why isn’t there a blog post about the serious grid problems? Three of my islands have been down most of the day, now my store and HQ is effectively down with 2000+ms physics time causing TD to drop to 0.05, and crashes every 5 minutes.
Since you want us to talk about technical problems here, not on the Linden Answers forum, you have a responsbility to post about them so we at least know what’s going on!
December 23rd, 2006 at 7:07 PM
Why is it so hard to email a newletter? I enjoy it.
December 23rd, 2006 at 11:01 PM
This isn’t a “frontier community”, this is an online service operated by Linden Labs with rules supposedly enforced by Linden Labs.
“If the residents have no teeth, then why all the complaints about - ohh, just off the top of my head, say… 1) greifing 2) banning 3) closed access parcels 4) religious cults old and new, 5) rip-offs…”
Because the residents have no teeth. There is no *mechanism* by which any other kind of governance can form, because Linden Labs hasn’t made any mechanism by which individuals can realistically apply sanctions against anyone…. or even protect themselves effectively… except by ripping SL apart into hundreds of isolated, insular communities and hiding inside these invitation-only private clubs.
Think about it. Closing access to a parcel is the absolutely strongest sanction any individual or group can impose, and it’s almost toothless for anyone who owns less than an estate… the problems it causes are not problems for the griefers and con artists who are the source of the problems, they’re problems for innocent third parties… like the folks who happen to run into them in their flying machines and are hurled off the grid just as effectively as if they were “de-orbited” by “razor”. The bad guys just move a few meters away and drop particle bombs, or return in alternate accounts and repeat the same actions under the cover of the anonymity Linden Labs provides.
The wealthy can retreat to estates. The rest of us have to put up with it… that’s frontier justice at work, boys, it’s justice for those who can pay for it… and ONLY those who can pay for it.
This has nothing to do with “community standards”. There’s some things that simply can’t be accepted. Harassment can’t be countered by harassment, it has to be met with *stronger* force, not weaker, and that means Linden Labs. Confidence games, and outright theft have to be dealt with by people who can actually do something about the humans behind the masks.
And just as Usenet had to do, LL has to distinguish between abuse *on* the grid and abuse *of* the grid. Or else SL will drown in con games just as Usenet nearly drowned in spam before the Usenet backbone GREW a backbone and enforced functional standards.
December 24th, 2006 at 4:07 AM
Hear hear Harle.
The price of freedom is responsibility–Thomas Jefferson
Look, I am limping along on a laptop with an incompatible graphics card and I STILL think SL is the most amazing creative outlet I have seen in my life. I am astounded by the kvetching I hear. At the same time, the fact that people take it all so seriously could indicate how deeply SL has penetrated their RL psyche.
I am thrilled about the RSS feed because for me switching between SL and internet is impossible, it’s either one or the other. (-:
December 24th, 2006 at 9:53 AM
ok is the grid open?
December 24th, 2006 at 11:15 AM
Is there a secure way residents can vote on issues? Maybe a Constitutional Convention needs to be called!
Hammering out a genuinely democratic society would definitely be a lot more expensive for the residents, in terms of time, effort, and other resources required to establish and maintain it.
Many people are not going to want to go to all that trouble. They just want to shop (or sell), and get laid, it would seem, or merely fight and grief others, judging from the vast proponderence of such content.
But I’m not convinced that’s all most people want out of SL…Maybe a lot, or at least some, are looking for something really different, beyond just a twisted hyped-up reflection of RL…
Maybe a special area needs to be set aside for development of an experimental community, for starters. How about calling it Ecotopia?! It might have to be at least of Estate size and powers, to maintain it’s autonomy.
As a total nooB to VR and SL, I wouldn’t be surprised if some such experiments have already sprung up, somewhere?…refs anyone?…probly mostly private enclaves of similarly minded people…going “public” really opens up a can of worms…
I totally agree that some bottom line standards would need to be established, and enforced, by coercion if necessary (such as banning…it might even require a military, to defend from attack!). The big question is how, and by whom the standards are set and enforced. If it’s by an elite group, it will not be democratic.
Consensus, or at least a consensus-seeking supermajority decision-making process, would seem to be the way to go.
Representation may be necessary for a large number of people, but it would have to be subject to viable democratic controls, including easy recall…and there would also have to be some kind of tribunal process, to resolve disputes, subject to democratic participation, and approval.
And there would have to be sufficiently clear incentives, and tangible benefits, to justify participation by a sufficient percentage of residents to keep it viable. If, say, at least 75% of the residents aren’t directly participating, at least by voting, it seems to me that it would definitely tend to devolve.
December 24th, 2006 at 11:48 AM
Having just gone back and read the links in the original post here, re: self-governance and Civic Center, I have to agree with what Harle Armistice says, and also Xana, above: the Lindens are doing a great thing here.
But I have also seen elsewhere the kind of points Stonecutter and others make above…it would seem there does need to be stricter enforcement. I’ve been griefed several times now, and I’ve only been here a couple of days!
I tend to disagree with the notion that KKK et al have any “right” to “freedom” of expression, or should be “tolerated”. Such elements forfeit any such rights, in my opinion, when they seek to deny them to others.
Democracy does not mean a few idiots have a “right” to “vote” to be racist pigs! The larger society has a right, and a responsibility to refuse to tolerate, indeed, to supress such tendencies. If they resist militarily, they should be suppressed militarily, and destroyed!
They are not an “oppressed minority”! They are an elitist minority seeking to oppress everyone else…nobody should have a “right” to do that!
December 25th, 2006 at 12:31 PM
WHERE ARE THE PLACES TO EAT?, WHERE ARE THE NAIL SALONS? JUST NOTICED NOBODY EVER EATS IN OUR SECOND LIFE. I CAN PUT A HOLD ON THE NAILS BUT EATING IS LIVING. I AM WONDERING IF EVERYONE IS SINGLE. ARE THERE ANY MARRIED SECOND LIFE FOLK.
JUST THINKING OUT LOUD
December 26th, 2006 at 5:38 PM
24 comments into the topic of government and someone wants to write censorship into the constitution.
January 13th, 2007 at 11:41 PM
Pathfinder, that’s great news - thanks!
Susie Boffin, there’s a great definition at RSStocracy.com: