From the LambdaMOO help system:
> help LTAND
LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction
I'm sorry that what follows is
so long, but I want to share the historical context that I perceive for current
events and for an announcement, which appears at the end of this message.
I should note at the very beginning that I had planned to put this
message together several weeks ago, very soon after I posted my last
*social-issues note. I talked about the general idea with the other wizards at
that time and I was supposed to draft a message and send it around for approval.
It seemed to me tonight, though, that I was procrastinating an awful lot and
that I'd better just write it and send it now, while I'm (temporarily)
up-to-date on *social.
As a result, the other wizards are seeing all
this at the same time as you are; I don't think they're going to be surprised
(except to the extent that Haakon finally doing something is always surprising),
but y'all should know that they haven't approved this note in advance.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Just
over two years ago, I sent email to four people that I had met in the very first
MOO, written by ghond and run on belch.berkeley.edu. I knew those four people by
the same names they use(d) here: Gemba, Gary_Severn, Frand, and ghond. The email
explained that I had opened the first `LambdaMOO', running a server derived from
ghond's but with enough changes of my own that I gave it a new name.
There weren't very many of us in the early months, of course. Each of us
pretty much knew everyone else and the only bureaucracy concerned taking care
that the wizards didn't step on each other's toes in making changes to (and,
really, creating from scratch) the first core of the LambdaMOO database. We were
a very small cadre of friends (I remember the jubilation we all felt the first
time there were more than 10 people connected at once) working together to build
something that maybe, just maybe, somebody else would find interesting enough to
visit more than once.
By the end of the third month or so, we had the
core, the server, and the documentation in sufficiently good shape that we felt
OK announcing the existence of LambdaMOO to rec.games.mud and thus inviting the
world into our creation. By this time, however, we already had (as I recall)
hundreds of players created by people who had heard of us simply by word of
mouth. We were beginning to have a community, though it was so small (`how small
was it?') that nearly every player who had ever connected had been personally
greeted by me. (I know, it must be hard to believe that I used to venture
regularly from my den, but it's so.)
We had, I think, already had some
discipline problems, even then. I remember a couple of assholes from PSU who
came in, changed their names to things I wouldn't want to say in front of my
mother, and started cursing at everyone in sight. I remember going to try to
talk to them about it, meeting stiff resistance, and finally recycling them in
frustration.
After the public announcement, of course, the place took a
little leap in popularity. We started seeing a wider variety of people coming
through, I stopped being able to greet each new player personally, and we
started having disagreements about what was and was not proper conduct here.
Eventually, I was approached by a number of players and asked to draft a set of
rules for proper MOO behavior. It was felt, by both myself and a number of the
other players, that this was a new kind of place, that we had gained some useful
experience with how well or badly certain kinds of behavior worked, and that at
least some of the lessons we had learned would not be obvious to new users. With
a written set of rules, we felt that new players could perhaps learn from our
experience and that maybe the amount of friction would be reduced.
Accordingly (and after one of my usual periods of procrastination), I
wrote a draft set of rules based entirely (as I recall) on the suggestions made
by the players who had made the request. I showed the draft to a bunch of people
and asked for their comments on its style, completeness, and correspondence with
their impressions of the `right' way of things. After incorporating suggested
changes, the first version of `help manners' was publicized in the newspaper; I
had, I think, done as good a job as I could of trying to capture the public
consensus of that (admittedly early) time.
Perhaps surprisingly, `help
manners' worked quite well in reducing the number of incidents of people
annoying each other. That society had a charter that reflected the general
opinion and social pressure worked to keep the MOO society growing fairly
smoothly.
We pretty much stopped growing over the summer of 1991, with
an maximum of about 25-30 people commonly connected at once. At the end of the
summer, though, as school restarted, we began growing almost alarmingly, with as
many as 40 or 45 people often connected at the high points. I recall counting on
the order of 350-400 people who had connected in the past week at that time.
As the society grew, so did the work load on the wizards. We were all
spending a lot of time looking carefully at what players had built and deciding
about requested quota increases, as well as other things, including arbitrating
various inter-player disputes. The load of new players (with their
understandable but frustrating disinclination to read documentation) and the
ever-increasing number of quota requests were leading some of the wizards,
including me, to feel stressed out and overworked. It became clear to me that
something had to be done to reduce the wizardly workload, so at the very
beginning of this year I created the Architecture Review Board, to try to shift
some of the burden off of the wizards and onto a larger group of experienced
players.
It took some working out, and I'm not saying that it didn't
disturb a number of players, but the ARB did eventually relieve the wizards of
what had become an intolerable burden. From our standpoint, anyway, it worked
very well.
A couple of months later, at the plaintive and repeated
requests of the other wizards, I agreed to move the MOO to a `registration'
basis, where new players were only created by people sending RL email to one of
the wizards. This has also worked to reduce some of the burden on wizards, since
it introduced an degree of accountability and a concomitant reduction in certain
kinds of disputes and discipline problems. I had resisted registration for
months, worried that, among other things, it might stifle the continued growth
and evolution of the MOO society.
I needn't have been concerned. The
growth has continued and continued, forcing us to come up with new mechanisms
and experimental solutions to the inevitable growing pains. We created
red-listing, black-listing, and grey-listing. We created the @newt and @toad
commands. We tried to block out a lot of people who we thought were causing
problems and then stopped trying because it's too hard to be effective at that
game. We were even forced to pop the top off of the limit on the number of
connections in order to meet the demands of LambdaMOO's growth.
Of
course, during this whole time, we were fighting an increasingly losing battle,
to control and accomodate and soothe a larger and larger, more and more complex
community. We were trying to take responsibility for, now, the behavior and
mores of over 800 people a week, connecting from almost 30 countries of the
world. We were frustrated, many of the players were frustrated; the center could
not hold.
You can probably see where this is leading.
I realize
now that the LambdaMOO community has attained a level of complexity and
diversity that I've actually been waiting and hoping for since four hackers and
I first set out to build this place: this society has left the nest.
I
believe that there is no longer a place here for wizard-mothers, guarding the
nest and trying to discipline the chicks for their own good. It is time for the
wizards to give up on the `mother' role and to begin relating to this society as
a group of adults with independent motivations and goals.
So, as the
last social decision we make for you, and whether or not you independent adults
wish it, the wizards are pulling out of the discipline/manners/arbitration
business; we're handing the burden and freedom of that role to the society at
large. We will no longer be the right people to run to with complaints about one
another's behavior, etc. The wings of this community are still wet (as anyone
can tell from reading *social-issues), but I think they're strong enough to fly
with.
There are a number of very important unresolved questions
concerning the transition to an out-of-the-nest society:
+ What
should happen to the ARB and the quota-granting process?
+ Who should be
making decisions about granting or refusing programmer bits?
+ What do we do
with the current `help manners'?
and almost certainly a bunch of other
things I'm not thinking of right now.
My personal model is that the
wizards should move into the role of systems programmers: our job is to keep the
MOO running well and getting better in a purely technical sense. That implies,
though, that we're responsible for keeping people from getting `unauthorized'
access; in particular, we still have to try to keep others from getting wizard
bits since the functional integrity of the entire MOO is clearly at risk
otherwise.
There are lots of details to be worked out, and I couldn't
possibly try to lay them all out here even if I were capable of thinking of all
of them in advance, but I am committed to removing the wizards from the social
sphere of the MOO *entirely* and *soon*. Haakon, Nosredna, Geust,
Slartibartfast, etc. will become technicians who work for the society. Lambda,
yduJ, JoeFeedback, Ford, etc. will much more clearly become just another set of
players in this community with no more power or moral authority than anyone
else.
It's a brave new world outside the nest, and I am very much
looking forward to exploring it with the rest of you. To those who have noted
that I have the ability to shut down the MOO at any moment, that my finger is,
after all, the one on the boot button: you have nothing to fear on that score
for the foreseeable future; only an utter fool would put an end to such an
exciting social experiment at so crucial a time in its evolution.
I
think we're going to have a lot of fun, here... :-)
Haakon the technician
and Lambda the lazy proletarian slob
>help LTAND2
LAMBDAMOO TAKES ANOTHER
DIRECTION
On December 9, 1992, Haakon posted 'LambdaMOO Takes A New
Direction' (LTAND). Its intent was to relieve the wizards of the responsiblity
for making social decisions, and to shift that burden onto the players
themselves. It indicated that the wizards would thenceforth refrain from making
social decisions, and serve the MOO only as technicians. Over the course of the
past three and a half years, it has become obvious that this was an impossible
ideal: The line between 'technical' and 'social' is not a clear one, and never
can be. The harassment that ensues each time we fail to achieve the impossible
is more than we are now willing to bear.
So, we now acknowledge and
accept that we have unavoidably made some social decisions over the past three
years, and inform you that we hold ourselves free to do so henceforth.
1. We Are Reintroducing Wizardly
Fiat
=====================================
In particular, we henceforth
explicitly reserve the right to make decisions that will unquestionably have
social impact. We also now acknowledge that any technical decision may have
social implications; we will no longer attempt to justify every action we take.
Players will still have a voice, however. Your input is essential. We
will keep our existing institutions for now, with the modifications described
below, but we encourage you to develop ideas for replacing these institutions
(as will be described in section 2).
a.
Petitions
------------
The petition system will remain in its current
form, with the following change:
In cases where difficulties arise that
were unanticipated by the
vetting process, we reserve the right to
re-interpret and/or
explicitly veto any clause of any passed
ballot.
We will continue to vet petitions, in order to minimize the use
of ballot veto, and we will continue to do so in terms of the existing vetting
criteria in most cases. However, we will not rule out the possibilities of
vetting being denied for other reasons, or of the vetting criteria being revised
by fiat.
b. Arbitration
--------------
We explicitly
reserve
(*) the right to veto any Arbitrator decision, particularly one
that
significantly impairs the ability of the wizards to do their
jobs.
(*) the right to veto any Arbitration Change Proposal that is
clearly
not a "minor change" in the spirit of *Ballot:Arbitration
(#50392)
or that significantly impairs the ability of the wizards to
do
their jobs.
These may be temporary measures, as we hope to
facilitate revision or replacement of Arbitration so that it may more adequately
meet the needs of the community.
c. Wizardly Actions with Social
Implications
--------------------------------------------
The wizards will
no longer refrain from taking actions that may have social implications. In
three and a half years, no adequate mechanism has been found that prevents
disruptive players from creating an intolerably hostile working environment for
the wizards. The LTAND ideal that we might somehow limit ourselves solely to
technical decisions has proven to be untenable.
2. Alternatives to
Wizards Making Social
Decisions
==================================================
We encourage
you, the players, to devise new mechanisms that will help minimize the need for
the wizards to make unilateral social decisions. Several mechanisms, most
notably the Arbitration system, seem less than ideal for the purpose, yet are
too deeply entrenched to be changed with the petition system. We would like to
try new mechanisms and to enable more radical changes than the current petition
system will allow. We would like the players to propose ideas for major new
institutions, and ways to select among the proposals. We hope this will
introduce a new dynamism to LambdaMOO that will allow us to find better
solutions to some of our more fundamental problems.
Similarly, we hope
to facilitate an overhaul of the current petition and ballot system if the
players want it.
Do keep in mind, though, that we cannot keep LambdaMOO
running without the wizards Haakon has selected. "Cyberspace" and "new social
reality" rhetoric aside, so long as the MOO is located on a single RL machine at
a single RL site subject to RL laws and liabilities, there will be those deemed
responsible for the use of that hardware. Part of the need for administrators is
also inherent in the LambdaMOO security model and the organization of
LambdaCore, while some of this need is a consequence of various quirks of
LambdaMOO society (e.g., the correspondence between RL identities and MOO
identities needing to remain secret and yet the need for someone to maintain
it). While we might consider ways to decentralize some of these tasks, the fact
remains that we simply can't decentralize everything. We are still open to your
suggestions for ways to decentralize what we can.
Suggestions such
as:
(*) persons not well trusted by Haakon might be granted wizard
bits
as a result of popular election, or
(*) we might set up a "wizard
machine" to run arbitrary
wizardly code with NO human intervention at
all
are not acceptable, however. There may be site administrators
somewhere who will accept the risks involved in implementing these ideas, but we
will not.
3. Rejection of the New
Direction?
==================================
We realize that not everyone
will agree that this is the best new direction LambdaMOO might take. We don't
doubt that some of the polemics among you will be able to come up with a
different slant, e.g. (just to save you some trouble),
wizardly
blackmail
military coup
martial law
nuclear terrorism
Some of
you may find the new direction so disagreeable that you will consider ways to
force an end to the new direction or ways to make the wizards' lives miserable
because of it. Instead of making the use of civil disobedience or wizard
harassment be the necessary means for shutting down LambdaMOO, we will accept a
*simple majority* decision of the following form:
Any eligible voter may
author a "shutdown" petition. This will be a
pre-vetted petition with a
specific, fixed wording. Should the
petition reach ballot stage (by acquiring
the usual signature
threshold), a vote will be held to decide whether
LambdaMOO should be
shut down. If the number of YES (we should shut down)
votes equals
or exceeds the number of NO (we should not shut down)
votes
received, LambdaMOO will be shut down after an 8-week grace
period.
(Note, only one "shutdown" petition may be active at a
time.)
Shutdown petitions will be implemented at the earliest
opportunity.
4. The New Direction
====================
We hope that
LambdaMOO will become a more dynamic and enjoyable place for the wizards and the
players. We do not want to discourage lively debate or to deprive players of a
voice, and we encourage all of you to develop new ideas, mechanisms, and social
policies, so as to minimize the need for direct wizardly social intervention as
much as possible.
-The Wizards of LambdaMOO
>help LTAD-Legality
Showing help on `LTAD-Legality':
----
Consent by
the population to message 300 on *News (#90702)
----------------------------------------------------------
by Li2CO3
(#79261)
[Last edited on Friday, May 17, 1996 at 9:50 pm]
Message 300 on *News will be stored as a help topic, available as LTAD,
LTAND2 and any other suitable names.
The information stored in the History
section of the Museum by pressing 11 will be stored as a help topic, available
as LTAND, LTAND1 and any other suitable names.
The text of this ballot will
be added as a help topic, available as LTAD-Legality, LTAND2-Legality, and any
other suitable names. The help topic will also record the final total of votes
on this ballot.
Message 300 on *News, known as LTAD, was a declaration by
the wizards saying that they would be able to make social decisions. This
statement violates the earlier wizardly declaration, known as LTAND, that
wizards would make no social decisions. This makes LTAD illegal.
This
ballot is an attempt to determine the legal and social standing of
LTAD.
The passage of this ballot additionally indicates:
The LTAD
declaration is legal.
The population has shown its confidence in the
Wizards.
The population has shown its consent to LTAD.
---
The
final vote count on this ballot was as follows:
In favor: 321
Against:
111
Abstaining: 272
The proposal passed.
>