Thoughts on Names

[Claude Desmoulins]

It isn't. Please note in the legislative discussion area there is a proposed bill to create a name selection mechanism. It will be discussed at tonight's RA meeting. If it passes as proposed, any citizen may submit whatever names they choose to the process.

[Diderot Mirabeau]

[quote="Flyingroc Chung":25ei7gaa]I wasn't at the town hall, but I thought the vote there was not binding?[/quote:25ei7gaa]

It was not binding. That's why a bill has been proposed for the RA to decide upon at their earliest convenience.

You can read the proposed wording of the bill [url=http://forums.neualtenburg.info/viewtop ... 1:25ei7gaa]here[/url:25ei7gaa].

[Jon Seattle]

I tend to think we should consider a change, not just because of attacks and threats, but for marketing purposes and to clear the air. Oh course I am very new here, and others might have much more invested in keeping the old one.

[Jonty Peel]

Does U.Z.'s latest post on the SL forums,

http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=112185

stating she has made an offer for use of the name, suggest that she now realises the weakness of her claim?

JP

[Diderot Mirabeau]

[quote="Jonty Peel":2ubp94mm]Does U.Z.'s latest post on the SL forums,
[..]
stating she has made an offer for use of the name, suggest that she now realises the weakness of her claim?
[/quote:2ubp94mm]

Personally, I'm trying not to follow this person's every rambling as I want my investment of time and effort in our community to be dominated by a passionate involvement with the experiment of self-government and the playful joy of experimenting rather than being dominated for example - by the manipulative, attention-seeking rhetoric of a person from whom you can expect a new self-contradiction every week.

You seem to have found another example of such a self-contradiction, though but I honestly do not feel that it's worth wasting more time on the theatricals. Let's get to work on making our community even better

[Dnate Mars]

[quote="Jonty Peel":35uyhub7]Does U.Z.'s latest post on the SL forums,

http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=112185

stating she has made an offer for use of the name, suggest that she now realises the weakness of her claim?

JP[/quote:35uyhub7]

I am unable to get this post, could someone recopy it to here so I may read it?

[Diderot Mirabeau]

[quote="Dnate Mars":2ojnph66]I am unable to get this post, could someone recopy it to here so I may read it?[/quote:2ojnph66]

Although there is no forum policy against quoting from secondlife.com forums here, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind contributors that one of the reasons why we migrated our forum off of secondlife.com boards was that we had grown tired of the ability of a few abusive individuals to exploit the impotence of the moderation tools to hijack the agenda.

I'd therefore strongly discourage the reposting of utterings from said individuals in this forum as it will only serve to continue this pattern of letting outsiders dominate our policy agenda.

People, please - let's manufacture our own constructive agenda and not maintain this fixation on what some outsiders might think or offer us of propositions that are not worth the virtual paper on which it's been written.

[Dnate Mars]

But if she offered something to us to stop using the name, we need to take that into account if and when we get a new city name. I think that what she said is relivent for this thread. Outsiders are always going to effect us, there is no way to change that.

[Sudane Erato]

The link works fine for me..??

I think its important to base any decisions about the future course of the community on factors which we *ourselves* determine are important. Ulrika appears to offer to give up any claims she has on our community, if we give up using the name Neualtenburg. We may, we may not. Let's let our own process, considering the things which we feel are important, determine how we make our decisions.

I don't feel there's any need for us to repost Ulrika's posts of somewhere else. She's perfectly free to post on this forum, if she pleases.

Sudane

[Dianne]

[quote="Sudane Erato":3cwv7jdh]... I think its important to base any decisions about the future course of the community on factors which we *ourselves* determine are important. Ulrika appears to offer to give up any claims she has on our community, if we give up using the name Neualtenburg. We may, we may not. Let's let our own process, considering the things which we feel are important, determine how we make our decisions.... [/quote:3cwv7jdh]I agree with this, I personally don't care at all what Ulrika thinks about the issue. IMO her reasoning is faulty in any case.

Diderot, I think you are taking me wrongly here. My objection to your wording on the name change referendum thingie was a technical issue only. Given the non-binding status of the vote at the town hall, we must not rule out that the populace might (by some miracle), have a landslide vote in favour of keeping Neualtenburg as the name. It's just not democratic to rule it out arbitrarily and we don't have the power to do so even though I think it unlikely to occur.

My other post where I was ruminating on"keeping" the name was just that, a rumination. Additionally, I did not and would not recommend keeping the name "just as it is." What I meant was that *if* people are thinking of keeping it, then the addition of the "over-arching" name would possibly make it different enough to qualify as a change.

Kendra and Ulrika make a valid moral point (if not a legal one), that the name is their creation. Even though it seems clear to me that we could legally go on using the name forever, I just don't think its a very "cool" or desirable thing to do. What I personally think however is about as relevant as what Ulrika personally thinks. It's up to the citizens as a whole, not Ulrika, or me, or you.

Clearly Ulrika's griefing and interference has made a lot of people very angry and it's only natural that the citizens of the city rebel against that and wish to keep the name that they see as "theirs," but my advice has always been to drop it as you know.

My advice has always been to drop the name, drop the bavarian sim, drop large parts of the government structure and most other things that are associated with the IP claim. To me it's like hanging on to tainted merchandise. Why would you want to?

That's just my personal opinion though, not many folks agree at all.

My point was that if there is a strong movement to keep the name, we have to go with that as there is no basis for refusing the will of the people.

If this is the case, I think that changing the name "Neualtenburg" to "Federated Republic of Neualtenburg" or "Neualtenburg - FDR" or any of the other suggestions for over arching names as an adjunct to the original is fair.

[Dnate Mars]

Oh, that was not a real offer. I retract everything I said.

I think she realizes that she could lose the case. I think we need to go forward. Unless she wants to buy the rights to the city name, I don't think that anything she says will be important.

[Sudane Erato]

For all the "sim-naming wordsmiths" out there, here's a site containing pages and pages of German language placenames.

[url:2l9qy5kq]http://www.datapage.de/de/start.html?id=6397[/url:2l9qy5kq]

Courtesy of my RL colleauge who is from Zurich and who has assisted with all of my ignorant attempts at German language signage and naming.

Sudane

[Patroklus Murakami]

I wasn't able to take part in the Town Hall meeting (or be inworld for the last couple of weeks) so haven't had a chance to discuss this with people.

My viewpoint may be pretty different to that of most of you, especially as the Town Hall appears to have come out in favour of a name change. My instinct is to say we should keep the name Neualtenburg. I have several reasons for thinking this way but continuity is a central one. We, the citizens and governmental institutions of the City of Neualtenburg, are the continuation of the experiment in virtual democracy begun in the Anzere sim, now based in the private sim of N'burg and about to expand, aren't we? If we give up that name we are acknowledging (at least implicitly) that there has been a discontinuity. Fine if that's what we accept has happened but that's not how I interpret what's taken place.

I also see no legal or moral problem with continuing to use the name. [I will expound on this if asked to but I guess where all treading carefully around legal arguments on this one.]

Dianne's post worried me in this regard. I think that putting the name, the bavarian theme and government institutions up for challenge risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For example, the bavarian theme is not to my taste but I think it works well, provides a consistent look and feel and has produced one of the more visually interesting sims. The government institutions make N'burg unique and, by and large, they work well. If we tamper with this too much we risk alienating the people who've been drawn to N'burg for one or more of these elements and who choose to remain.

The temptation is to make large-scale revolutionary changes at a time like this. I'd favour much slower, gradual evolutionary change!

So my proposal would be - Neultenburg for the sim (AKA 'the City of Neualtenburg') and 'Democratic Republic of Neualtenburg' for the overall project. Nova Colonia would be called 'Nova Colonia DRN'. (Which is kinda similar to the OP and Dianne's first post. Perhaps I'm not so out on a limb on this one?)

[Diderot Mirabeau]

[quote="Patroklus Murakami":36zbxjqp]Neualtenburg, are the continuation of the experiment in virtual democracy begun in the Anzere sim, now based in the private sim of N'burg and about to expand, aren't we? If we give up that name we are acknowledging (at least implicitly) that there has been a discontinuity. Fine if that's what we accept has happened but that's not how I interpret what's taken place.[/quote:36zbxjqp]

I think everybody agrees with you that Neualtenburg would be the best name for our community and that our community is more or less the same as it was since before a few weeks ago - i.e. no discontinuity.

However, I fail to see you address the most crucial motivating factors in deciding to change the name:

- There is currently a forum on secondlife.com carrying the Neualtenburg name, which is outside the ownership of the government of Neualtenburg. This purports to be the official forum of Neualtenburg and in many newbie users eyes it will be the primary source of reference for all things Neualtenburg-related. Regrettably, the forum is full of slander and one-sided claims against the government and community of Neualtenburg. The name has been mortally tainted by this fact in my view and I don't see how your proposal does anything to change that.

- As I've written earlier already setting up our own "counterforum" on secondlife.com is not a useful way forward since the useless moderation tools offered by Linden Lab do not support the (temporary) banning of people if they transgress our moderation rules. Furthermore, you need an SL group to back the formation of a discussion group and the founder of this SL group will at all times be able to perform a coup against the present moderators of the group.

- Furthermore there is the "Port Neualtenburg" development, which presumaby will continue to exist in so far as the founder is able to attract other people to work for her and continues to be motivated about the project herself. The existence of this parallel project obviously will cause even further confusion especially in the "Find place" results for newbies trying to find our sim.

- Finally I think it's fair to say that the Neualtenburg-name has in SL invariably come to be associated with the periodic tantrums and spectacular examples of "espouse this ideology, do the exact opposite when your own interests are on the line" by certain members of the founding group of people. If by a namechange we would enjoy the added benefit of no longer being associated with such antics I'd say so much the better.

We were 18 citizens at the Town Hall Meeting + several guests, who listened to explanations of the circumstances of the situation and made an informed choice on that background unanimously, which was to change the name of the sim.

If you feel you can live with the name causing the abovementioned confusion and being associated with such antics I urge you to vote for keeping the name. If however you feel a clean break is in order and desire the chance to start afresh and rid the city of the constant psychological burden of thinking ("what might this founder so and so think of this decision") then propose and vote for a new name!

[Patroklus Murakami]

Thanks for replying Diderot, those are good points well made. As I said in my first post, I haven't really had a chance to participate in the discussion so far. Your post was very helpful in summarising the (strong) arguments in favour of changing the name of the sim/overall project. I'm afraid that I still think it would be a mistake to do this though.

In response to the points you make:
-We have no control over what ex-citizens, ex-founders or anyone else does. So we cannot stop the moderators of the 'Neualtenburg Projekt' forum from slandering our name any more than we could stop them from setting up a 'Neustadt Projekt' or any other 'xxx Projekt' in response to a change of name by our City. You cannot copyright a name and any new name we choose could be spoiled by a rival project. Giving up the name of Neualtenburg, however, [i:2hv8rybs]legitimises[/i:2hv8rybs] the notion that we are not the inheritors of that experiment and would be a capitulation in my opinion.

-Of course a 'Democratic Republic of Neualtenburg' forum on SLs servers carries the same risk of 'founder power' that SL groups inherently have. But that is not a good reason for totally abandoning them. The current 'solution' completely fails to give interested parties our side of the story. We should re-establish a presence on the SL forums immediately in order to have our side of the story readily available to SL citizens. We should aim to find a way round the problems LL present (the founders could sign a statement letting LL know who should be regarded as moderators for example) rather than walking away from the situation.

-The presence of two 'Neualtenburgs' will confuse people, but that's not down to us and it will be readily apparent to anyone who the real 'Neualtenburgers' are. I don't think the 'Port Neualtenburg' initiative will attract many followers nor do I think the 'Neualtenburg Projekt' has much life in it. We should have the courage of our convictions and believe that N'burg will expand and continue to grow while the rival entity will wither. It's already pretty obvious that the rump LL forum is turning into a conversation largely between two people.

-The name of "Neualtenburg' has been tainted, it was pretty tainted before this particular episode! Part of that is down to the episodic tantrums but I think that fundamentally it is because representative democracy is necessarily messy and quarrels, arguments and throwing toys out of the pram are parts of the process. This will be the case [i:2hv8rybs]whatever our new name is[/i:2hv8rybs].

Changing the name is a diversion in my opinion. It utterly fails to solve any of the problems it claims to and ties us up in unnecessary discussion of changes we don't need to make.