Groups in Second Life are social organizational structures. So what makes a group a group?
- Meta-Data — Information about the group itself, such as its name
- Organization — Currently just a two-tier system of Officers and Members
- Permissions — Who can do what?
- Communication — Movement of data (even objects) among group members
- Ownership — The group itself can own objects, land, and money
Meta-data is split between what is determined at the time of creation of the group, and data that is descriptive of the group and can be changed at a later time: mission statements, member titles, status on public registers, etc. There will always be a need for this meta-data, as well as a means to control who can change it.
The organization options for current groups are few, offering only the two-tier system of Officer and Member, and a one-tier system if only the Officer tier is used. A military system of many ranks would be impossible, as would a government system with multiple branches. There needs to be any number of sub-divisions to a group, in whatever inter-relationship that the group requires.
Permissions are set solely on the status of being either an Officer (full permissions) or a Member (few permissions). Beyond that, permissions are set by the objects and land that are associated with or owned by the group. There is no fine-tuning of who can do what beyond clumping people into one of the two categories. Without that ability, even having more sub-divisions in a group would be limited by the permissions built into them unless groups came with the ability to edit permissions on a detailed scale.
Group communication is fairly primitive at this time. A message can only be sent live to all group members (regardless of which sub-division they are part of) when they are online. The only way to send a message to all members is to create a vote event, the outcome of which no one cares about. I’ve even seen Lindens use this hack, a sure sign that there is a need for better communications in groups.
Ownership. This is a true tar pit of (dis)functionality right now. By being able to own objects, money, land, and the abstract of land allocation credit, groups take on the mantle of playership. They become a semi-living entity to the system, but without any one person in control. Allocation, once given to a group, can be taken back at any time by the member that gave it. Land, however, becomes the property of the group and only the Officers can sell or give it away. Groups can own money, but only till the end of the day at which point it is distributed evenly to every Officer and Member — a distribution that can not be changed or prevented. And objects, once given to a group, can never be un-given. Not one type of ownership is like any other. Horribly confusing and inflexible.
So that’s the way things stand. It’s no wonder that Linden Lab is looking for suggestions as to how to clean this mess up and make groups into a tool for creating engaging social organization. Linden Lab took a shot at imagining the needs of future residents when groups were designed, but fell short. But that’s not surprising to me. Even with a larger pool of minds assembling lists of possible refinements and extensions to groups, some needs, and it may even be safe to say most, will still not be met in the end.
You can’t plan for every possible case, so what is there to do? …I have some ideas.
Next: Groups on the Brain
6 Comments
Tiger, all of this has been pretty much absorbed already by all of us concerned about group tools reform. We all “get it” that the permissions have to be granularized, and made more flexible. We’ve been saying this for months, before you tuned in. In fact months and months ago, on the forums, I had a post, “The Groups *Are* The Government” in which I pointed out that there were at least 24 functions in the groups which should merely be toggled in an endlessly customizable way, to create new clusters of functions, rather than to have the static roles like “officer” that can always do X and Y and Z, but since Z is selling my land out from under me, I don’t have staff.
Studying this quite a bit more, we came up with 35 (or you could make 40, depending on how you characterize all the functions when you interact with the “about land” menu). Ok, we all got that. Granularity. Flexibility. Customization. Perhaps not all 35 or 40 or whatever should be endlessly toggled; perhaps there are some clusters that always must go together (i.e. why give someone the right to set the music stream but not deed the video or run the media menu, etc.; separate functions, yet they could cluster together.)
All this is clear, and everybody gets it. But…Knowing there is a tiny but very articulate, and very entrenched, and very close (or seeking proximity) to the Lindens minority that is leftist and socialist (often inchoately so), I even magnanimously say, ok, you want to keep these San Francisco Summer of Love hippie dope-smoking tools that spread all the wealth equally and make it possible to Steal This Land? OK, keep them…or make them even more hippie, I don’t care, just let me have the same flexibility NOT to have a man separated from his land after he has paid the purchase price. Let me live in the Winter of Hate if I must…
But here’s where the difficulty comes in. There’s quite a lobby now on the forums, and you appear to be among them, that flies the flag of “Power to the People” and “granularity” but in fact could be imposing a heavy burden of paralysis and rigidity by making too much endless choice a constant.
How could this be? By subjecting every damn thing to a vote, always and everywhere. I don’t want to have each function be voted on by every damn member in the group always and everywhere. People nowadays are so conditioned to nod sagely about “the wisdom of crowds” that they forget that clumps of people are often pretty dumb when left to endlessly keep fussing over something. That isn’t about “tyranny” and “being a dictator” it’s about managing a group with a very limited and distinct purpose, i.e. rentals. I don’t want three-hour meetings with everyone who happens to put in 512 tier for a $250 discount off their rental, with votes using that 512 tiny bit of tier each time a decision has to made — do we buy this water that has suddenly appeared in the middle of the night in a parcel formerly owned by a seemingly stable large neighbour, now chopped to smithereens by Anshe Chung, or not?
Pham Neutra sounds as if he is proposing to make voting like that — and that’s a good reason why third parties never get started in the US, and on the left in particular, whatever success they might have (and it’s not been so great lately!) in other countries.
So, to summarize, I have the following concerns about your proposals
1. Have you read anything that I and others have already been writing on groups — for months? Go to my blog at http://secondthoughts.typepad.com A good summary is “What if the Pizza Guy Stole LL?” in which I point out that our Lindens don’t eat their dog food and don’t live in these groups (of course some assure me that indeed they do, but by that, they mean a group to organize an event or the mentors or something, not the kind of businesses and land groups we are talking about).
2. Do you yourself have a land group or participate in a land group or a group selling group objects or working on a group build where there are sales? Looking at your groups, I hate to say it, but it really seems as if you *do not know what you are talking about in practical terms*. I’m sorry if this seems blunt, but I’m known for bluntness anyway, and frankly, there is too much at stake here to have the group tools just become another playground not only for these hippies in San Francisco, but the hippies here in SL. You have groups for talking about this or that, groups for being a tenant in a mall, groups for previewing or hanging out with friends or goofing around and experimenting with stuff like time.
But you do not have *groups for MANAGEMENT OF people, land, objects, events, rentals, etc.* such as some of us have who feel a great stake in this.
3. WHAT is your goal in becoming involved in this now (at a relatively late stage, when the Lindens pretty much sound like they’ve got it doped out already). Is it a cool tekkie thing to be doing, an interesting experiment for you? Or do you yourself have something specific you want to accomplish in groups that you are actually in?
I suspect the answer to no. 1 is that no, you do not have any land group, or at least not one with very many people in it and complex problems. Hence, the overly complex, impractical, programmy, tekkie-wiki feel to everything you are saying. Again, sorry for putting it that way, but if you are going to use your stature as a smart, older, player with connections, and the Lindens are going to listen to you, we simply have to interject: you do not have experience in DOING the things that we want these tools to DO.
If you DO have experience, by all means, bring it forward, and if you do NOT, plese take a deep breath and ask yourself: why aren’t you asking others who actually do this to tell you the problems with the group tools, instead of just abstract fixing them on your own?
For example, I have spent a year struggling with these tools, and tried every conceivable hack, workaround, firewall, concentric formation, cutaway, and to get them to work. I have a dozen land groups, with hundreds of people in them. I’m not a rich person, but I’m obviously a busy person. I’m not an evil land baron, I’m just a middle-level rentals agent who has ideals like even some of the hippie communists about making communities better. But I refuse to be separated from my money and land by people who don’t pay time, talent, or treasure for it, it’s just that simple.
What I’d like you to do, is to stop futzing around with all these complex trees and hierchies and decision making and endlessly permutations of permissions and think about this:
A) How can we fill the gaping hole in the tools now that enable any officer to sell land out from any other officer, regardless of whether he paid the up-front purchase price, or pays tier? This has to be airtight. This has to be not a vote, but a yes/no, stop/go switch.
B) Whatever your need for all those buzzy “collective intelligence” type “People’s Power” groups, how can we prevent rank-and-file members of business groups from completely paralyzing a management group that is set up to accomplish a few limited functions, i.e. rent land, return prims? Again, yes/no, stop/go, not a vote. Vote on it if you want if you chose “yes” but let anyone who wants to get work done chose “no”.
The tools absolutely must remain flexible. I don’t believe from what Daniel Linden is saying that there needs to be any compromise on this. But I do think those still rooting for collectivism and collective control over founders or founders-plus-trusted-few need to take a giant step back and ask themselves, as I keep asking:
Where are the groups that are run by collectives, with equal input and output of resources? Ok, yes, we thought of Neultenberg. Next? Oh, Lusk or something? Ok…could you think extra hard and come up with some FRESH and DIVERSE examples? Well…there aren’t any! Because it’s a utopian ideal. So let’s stop nerfing the tools around these silly ideals and look at what people really do in this world, and how to make the tools serve them, instead of having the programmers set up unwieldly, unnecessary, and even destructive tools for the sake of their own abstract elegant solutions.
I found this to be a very lucid explanation for even a new Resi who isn’t familiar with group mechanics in SL yet. There are a lot of questions that come up, and it’s nice you’ve started a blog (I note you even referred to “stream of consciousness”) to lay this out. 🙂
To Prokofy:
I’ll be going over most of what you mentioned here in later entries, but I’ll hit some quick points here. (This blog isn’t a discussion forum.)
1) I’d be VERY happy if there was NO vote system built into Second Life. I think groups should be controled only by the founder and those they choose to grant power to, by default. I think voting, if implemented at all, should be implemented by the people running the groups that NEED it.
2) You noticed that I’ve been around for over 2 1/2 years on SL, and that I’m not currently in any groups that have to cope with all the failings of the current group system. The two are realted. It’s a “been there, but unable to do that” situation. I’ve known by experience the impossibility of doing what I want to do, so I gave up long ago to wait for fixes. But I’ve been pushing for a more granular permission system since my first months in Second Life. I knew even then it was needed. I’m active in this again now because NOW the Lindens are asking for input.
3) But I’m totaly with you on “clumps of people are often pretty dumb” 🙂
To Torley: Thanks. 🙂
nonsanity, I have no problem with voting tools being included in the set of tools that groups use. But of course, they are rigid and stupid now (i.e. the hack for group comms has to use a “vote” for an announcement, etc.) and you can’t hand-pick a sub-set of members you’d like to advance from member to officer, you’re forced to put the entire class of members up for the vote, and then hack around it by either expelling those members you don’t want in the voted class temporarily, making a group with only those members, or somehow conveying the selection.
Voting is useful, and having the flexibility of either 51 percent or 2/3 majority and quorum sets is useful. What’s a problem is when you graft that on to a necessary hurdle to cross before you can accomplish anything.
Example: purchase of land. I don’t want every single person with a 512 donation in the group to have a vote every time a piece of land needs to be bought or sold out of a group that is basically a business with a few limited functions, like renting. In fact, most rentals agents don’t even accept tier because they just don’t want to even face this issue. It would be one thing if you said, let’s make sure all tier-paying members can have a say in the group’s activities, and build a group for that purpose. There might be some who are in a very exclusive, or themed, or dedicated-purpose type of group who want to make sure 512-owners are heard as much as 65k-owners. Let them. But don’t impose that perceived need for democracy in some settings over every execution of a function. Make voting always optional. Never make it a clearance to be got through.
Basically, if someone doesn’t like the founder, his visions, his toggled permissions, his voting limitations, they need to just found another group to their liking.
2) I’m glad you’ve been pushing for granular permissions ever since your first months in SL, when I was a mere beta tester in 2-3 TSO, endlessly carving gnomes and greening up my sim. I’m glad. Except that you still don’t explain whether you attempted to work in LAND GROUPS as distinct from, say, just experimental groups to do this or that kewl tekkie thing. That’s fine. But I do want to understand whether you are prepared, in your zeal (fired from long-standing frustration) to hear from other quarters of this society that do not have your wants and needs, but have their own wants and needs to make these groups work. That’s really important.
Now, as to two things you said in this post:
1) “only the Officers can sell or give it away”
Well, when you talk like this, it makes it sound like your problem with this feature is that “only Officers” get to do this neat thing called ‘selling or giving away land’. I guess I personally am less thrilled than you are by “giving away” land because land, for me, being just a rank-and-file player with no special Linden connection, winning of a Game Dev contest, or other feting, always has to BUY land and usually and a fairly brisk market price, since I tend to slowly acquire parcels on sims in cooperation with good neighbours tending sims, rather than just buy a whole sim on the auction and chopping it up and turning on the for-sale or the rento and going to play World of Warcraft.
Obviously, what I’m WAY more concerned about here is the problem of the Treacherous Officer who seems like your best friend, might even be a partner, or even someone you know in RL or met in RL, who screws you by either suddenly pulling all the tier out of the group in the middle of the night, exposing you to Linden seizure, or selling land you paid for and tier out of the group for their own gain, or, what is more common, forcing you suddenly to buy their land at a top market price in order to “hold the view” because they are suddenly pulling out of your project due to some tantrum they are having.
This is not pleasant, and the group tools have to be fixed to stop up these holes, so that founders who pay for and tier land can create officers who can donate tier or return prims or do other functions in the group, but not sell the land out from under you. There’s probably nothing that can be done to fix the problem of a Treacherous Officer who suddenly extorts a land sale out of you from land that they either hand in the group, or purchased next to the group to “hold the view” and prevent blight…short of fixing human nature itself. But you can at least prevent that person from savaging you by stealing the land, or, if the Lindens make good on the covenant issue, reneging on the covenant that may have been originally established for the land’s use on that sim…so that they don’t destroy it by putting it on the open market to sell to a club, when you had some other concept that you and the other group members covenanted about. (The covenant stuff is fraught with huge issues, but until the Lindens actually cough up the info on what they are doing with the group tools, I can’t respond effectively).
And 2), sorry pressed submit too soon, in response to this statement:
And objects, once given to a group, can never be un-given.
I wonder how much experience you really have had in trying to do group projects and work groups if you make this statement.
It is not a true statement.
What you are referring to is the function of “deeding objects to a group”. The videos require the tenant to sell to the landlord the TV for $0 in order to deed it. The officer/landlord then deeds the TV to make it work on group land. When it’s time for the tenant to leave the rental, the officer just goes into this deeded object, which of course he can still access, and sets it to sale for $0. He then buys it, makes it his own object (not the group’s) and then either passes it to the tenant in his inventory, or sets it to $0 for the tenant to buy.
The workaround then to overcome what you are saying, for any group-deeded object, and I’ve worked with many of them (music URL changers, vendors, houses, etc.) is to simply have the officer — or for that matter any member of the group wearing the group tag — go back and set the item to sale for $0 for anyone, group or not, to buy. Not perfect, but works.
I do find that some items that you deed to the group get buggy. I have even had the experience that my own alt or even my own self can’t get back at using an object that I myself created, am listed as creator on, and deeded. I’ve had to call Lindens sometimes to undo this wierdness. It’s why I usually avoid deeding. Setting to group is also far from perfect. Often anyone in the group then can take a house set to the group for the convenience of say, re-texturing a house, and swipe it into their inventory.
There’s another unpleasantness about group-deeded items. When you press “return” on prims on land, say, when a tenant does not pay for a week and has to be removed for a new tenant, the deeded objects can simply disappear into the ether, never to return, even in lost-and-found. The game even generates a message now (since I and others kept asking the Lindens why they were allowing thousands of dollars of videos to be destroyed like this without warning), “warning: group-deeded items will be deleted.
The reason is simple. The game — the internal mechanics of the game — knows that a thing called “group deeded” belongs to Nobody. It’s not a socialist. It knows everything has to go to somebody’s folder. But it can’t tell whose. So it just destroys it. Perfect statement on socialism, if you ask me, couldn’t have found a better one in a million years.
So to workaround this, you have to first make sure you sell to yourself those deeded items before pressing return. Now, in a later version of SL, for some reason, some deeded objects, the ones that began as your own, do come back to you. But other deeded objects, that didn’t begin as your own, get deleted.
So there are some risky hacks to get around the group-deeded (what I call “group owned” as opposed to “group tagged”) object issue. I’m glad, though the risk might be unacceptable to me for large projects. (I, too, know about those transfer lock-up bugs.) But as you say, there are many other problems with them. More than enough to require fixing.
Now not to say that you are “preaching to the chior” here, but your goals and mine aren’t that dissimiar, it would seem. Though you may not see it in me yet. I hope that as I keep writing, you will see it.
As for voting…
In short: I’d be happy if voting was gone tomorrow, completely.
In long: Please read my latest entry “Voting, Trust, and Accountability… Oh My!”