Learn how one of the first virtual worlds ballooned into a real-life nightmare,

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  • My primary inspiration for the design of the petitions and ballots system was the voter-sponsored initiative process here in California. It was simple in outline: any LambdaMOO citizen could create a petition proposing that the wizards take some action; if it got enough signatures, it became a public ballot measure that passed on a two-thirds majority vote. Before a petition could become a ballot, though, it was necessary for the wizards to "vet" it, to ensure that the proposal was (a) clear, (b) feasible, (c) appropriate, (d) legal, and (e) secure.
  • Overall, though, I'd have to say that the petition system has failed on LambdaMOO. It has, by and large, failed to be the jumping off point I hoped for; we have not seen it used successfully to move LambdaMOO to a working, stable form of self government. There were long periods, indeed, where many petitions reached ballot stage and none of them passed; it seems to me now that the voting population could never agree on anything of real substance. I think that this is the real lesson of LambdaMOO's experiment with direct democracy.
  • Deep in its very structure, LambdaMOO depends on the wizards and on the owner of its machine. These are not and cannot be purely technical considerations. Social policy permeates nearly every aspect of LambdaMOO's operations, and only the wizards can carry out those operations. As a result, the wizards were at every turn forced to make social decisions. Every time we made one, it seemed, someone took offense, someone believed that we had done the wrong thing, someone accused us of awful ulterior motives. It felt a bit like the laws of thermodynamics: you can't win, you can't even break even, and you can't get out of the game.
  • Throughout the entire month of April, the wizards' private mailing list was pulsing with activity; we were drafting, arguing about, and re-drafting a new fiat, my third pivotal message to *Social-Issues. Finally, on May 16th, we all agreed on a draft and I posted LTAD: LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction. In it, we formally repudiated my earlier theory of a social/technical dichotomy; we explained how impossible that fiction was and declared our intent to cease apologizing for our failures to make it reality. It was, in a way, a wizardly coup d'etat; out with the old order, in with the new.

Conclusion: Can We Get Where From Here?

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