Bagheera wrote: ↑Thu Aug 02, 2018 8:57 pm
After Bixyl came to the RA meeting last Monday, it reminded me to go read the SL Newsie. I spent the afternoon reading comments and catching up on what happened with InWorldz. Personally, I never got into InWorldz but I had several friends who split their time between SL and IW. The flaw to InWorldz, as it appeared to me, was it was dependent on the persons who created it and their control. It seems, based on InWorldz success that it DID have (it would have overcome even this obstacle except the creator decided to divert the rescue mission to a different path), that there actually might be a very real need/opportunity for a democratically controlled virtual world. I hadn't really entertained the concept seriously until this past week, but now I am thinking there might be a real "there" there.
I agree that there's an opportunity -I'm a bit on the conflicted side as to how to take advantage of it.
There's a couple of (at least nominally) democratically-run grids; Metropolis grid (hypergrid.org) and 3rdrockgrid. I am renting regions on both grids right now.
Metropolis grid is a German grid (most announcements are in both German and English) and for a while at least they were going to try to have things run by some sort of parliment. I'm not sure what's happened by that, and I suspect it's fallen by the wayside.
I was a member of 3RG a few years back, and the grid is in theory meant to be run by the users. I'm not sure what is going on with that today, but when I visited earlier today I was seeing new citizens taking up different responsibilities (eg one person was remaking their mainland area).
Obviously I welcome the thought of expanding out into the hypergrid. To do that, I think we're first going to need to examine what contractual and constitutional obstacles would get in the way of doing so.
I think we should revisit the question of outposts or colonies -CDS affiliated (but not necessarily owned) properties which could exist either in SL or on the hypergrid.
I think that would present a bite-sized way of working towards eventually having our own standalone grid in the future. The contractual and constitutional issues that would come up when it comes to establishing outposts would also come up if we tried to establish our own grid. But by going the outpost route we either can have a smaller investment, or ideally they would be self-funded and the entire estate isn't necessarily committed. If they go the way of Al-Andalus we're out nothing.
Rosie did a survey during her term which showed that there was little interest in opensim, though there was some. With that being the case I think it might be better if we think along the lines of providing means for those who are interested to "hitch their wagon" to the CDS as opposed to taking the CDS (with 90% of the folks being uninterested) out to Opensim.
Another question is ..."why?" We were originally founded (in part) to solve a specific problem; splitting the cost and resources of region ownership for the sake of making it managable. 30 people paying X amount of cash instead of one paying ~$300+deposit. That problem doesn't exist in opensim, so on an existential level we'd have to figure out what it is exactly we'd be bringing out there which would be relevant to anything.
I am still trying to think that one through. But I think that mentoring and stability would be two things we could offer out there. I can definitely see a place for an Artisan Guild on the hypergrid, as well as mentoring people who are new to estate/region and grid ownership.