New Guild Charter
1. Mission and Organization
The Guild will be a community chartered voluntary organization. All projects that involve the expenditure of public funds must be approved by the CDS government.
Mission
The new Guild has the following responsibilities:
1. To organize, plan, and execute the construction of new simulator regions, extending CDS territory.
2. To provide continuing hands-on education in: building, design, architecture, digital content development, scripting and the development of external software used to support in-world activities. To provide certification in these skills.
This education must be free to all citizens who are willing to work on CDS sponsored projects, and may be made available to non-citizens willing to pay tuition.
3. To provide technical advice and services to the office of the chancellor and the RA as needed to maintain and develop CDS regions.
4. To acquire and manage resources needed by citizens for building and design such as sandbox areas and prim banks. To set rules for the use of these resources.
Organization
The Guild is governed by two committees:
1. The faculty committee will design the curriculum for continuing education, decide on artistic and technical capabilities a student must demonstrate to obtain certification and will set procedures and standards for the design and construction of new simulator regions.
Membership on the faculty committee will depend only on artistic, technical, and pedagogical skills. Membership will not be limited to citizens of the CDS.
2. The administrative board will manage Guild resources, land, and buildings, set policies and procedures both for the Guild and for the school, and organize work groups to respond to requests of the CDS, or others. The board represents the Guild in all dealings with the CDS.
2. The Administrative Board
Mission / Decision Making
The administrative board will manage Guild resources, land, and buildings, set policies and procedures for the Guild, and organize work groups to respond to requests of the CDS, or others. The board represents the Guild in all dealings with the CDS.
Decisions will be made by majority vote of the voting members. The administrative board may remove any member or any member of the faculty committee with a two-thirds vote excluding that member. This should be done only in an emergency.
Membership
Membership on the administrative board will be open to every citizen of the CDS. However, some citizens may be voting and others non-voting members of the board.
To be a voting member of the board, a member must contribute at least ten hours of work on guild projects during the prior quarter. Quarters are three month periods starting with the seating of the CDS Representative Assembly. Members may suspend their own voting rights before the start if a quarter for as many as two consecutive quarters in order to use service hours from an earlier quarter.
All members who join during the first quarter of the new Guild’s founding are considered voting members for that quarter. Service hours may include:
- Time spent teaching classes or workshops or mentoring CDS citizens
- Work on Guild projects under supervision of a project leader
- Time spent at Guild meetings (faculty, board, and project meetings)
- Other services provided at the request of the administrative board or faculty
Every six months the administrative board will elect a secretary who will organize and chair meetings and serve as a spokesperson for the Guild.
3. The Faculty
Mission and Responsibilities
The faculty committee will design the curriculum for continuing education, decide on artistic and technical capabilities a student must demonstrate to obtain certification and will set procedures and standards for the design and construction of new simulator regions.
Non-faculty guild members will often will teach and mentor others. Faculty members are specifically responsible for organizing the curriculum and teaching an learning programs.
Membership
Members of the faculty must demonstrate excellence in design and building and / or scripting skills; the ability and willingness to mentor others who want to develop their skills; and the ability to lead substantial multi-person projects. Membership is not limited to citizens of the CDS.
The faculty will elect it’s own members. Becoming a member of the faculty requires meeting one of the certification standards established by the faculty. This will require presenting a portfolio or work and teaching experience; evaluation of that experience by the faculty; and organizing a public presentation of that work.
Twice a year, at CDS election date, one member of the faculty will be elected as chair. The secretary of the administrative committee may also convene meetings of the faculty but will not have a vote.
A small group of citizens with excellent design skills who have made significant contributions to past CDS projects will be invited to form the initial faculty. Because it is expected that other citizens with significant experience will want to join immediately the faculty should quickly establish standards and procedures to add new faculty members.
4. Sim Development and Public Review Process
The following are my thoughts on how to organize the sim proposal process. A similar procedure could be followed for any significant redevelopment effort. Note that while this uses competition this is intentionally not a winner-take-all process. Stronger proposals are often the synthesis of multiple of points of view. The goal is to keep the public involved and providing feedback, not only on finished proposals but at every stage of the process.
Also we will, over time, need more than one sim proposal, so why not keep the ones we are not implementing immediately under development for future efforts?
Phase 1.
1. The New Guild sponsors a competition for sim proposals submitted by one or more teams. Proposals are not required to include details models, schedules, and budgets at this phase but must include this detail before final approval in phase 2.
2. Without evaluating individual proposals, the faculty of the Guild will provide feedback on the technical feasibility and issues in the implementation of each proposal. Proposers may change their proposals in response to this feedback.
3. The New Guild establishes an area for public display of the work being developed by each team.
Phase 2.
1. All citizens are allowed to vote on the proposals over a period of several weeks. Proposers can and are invited to change their proposals in response to new ideas and public feedback. Voting is continuous during this period: citizens can move their vote token from one proposal to another.
2. Proposers can merge their proposals with that of others. In fact this may be one of the best approaches to gain votes. Collaboration and negotiation, not just competition is rewarded.
3. Proposals must go beyond defining themes and include models of the landscape and architecture; concrete plans for implementation; initial project budgets and schedules. The faculty will be required to comment on the feasibility of any plan given available resources.
4. At the end of the process we select the most popular proposal(s) to implement. However this process is designed to allow more than one good proposal to emerge and that proposal can start off the next round.
Phase 3.
Implementation may depend on RA approval. It is quite possible that the RA may not want to sponsor a proposal, in which case we can loop back and extend to phase 2 to make corrections.
During the third phase we will arrange for the financial resources needed for implementation, and also to flesh out any details needed to implement that plan. As the SPC did, the New Guild will look for people willing to loan us the funds needed to purchase a sim.
The goal in the phase is to do enough planning so that we can quickly complete the implementation of the build and get the sim to the point where we can start selling plots.
Phase 4.
The forth phase is to actually do the build. The SPC is a good example of how an experienced project manager (Moon Adamant) and a collection of dedicated volunteers can work well in implementing the sim. Working with the RA the New Guild will appoint a project manager to organize the process. The project manager will report back to the administrative board.
Phase 5.
Promotion. The New Guild needs to establish contacts and channels for getting out promotional material and resources for organizing events to publicize new sims.
