I'm going to host a small series of in-world debates and discussions around the role of citizens empowered with social networking tools in our current democracies. This is a way to kick one of my old groups, "Virtual Governance", back into shape 
Some of you might still remember the ones we held a year ago or so.
I'm starting with a series of three events (a fourth one to be held if there is enough attendance to justify it). The overall theme is how the current financial crisis is really just a crisis of values — it's not even a political crisis, even though the political crisis has social consequences. So we'll start (today) discussing if citizens, with their Internet access to social networking tools, actually have more or less freedom of expression. Next, on Wednesday, we'll take a look at what values a democracy should uphold (and how we, as citizens, can guarantee that our elected representatives actually uphold the same values!). And finally, on Sunday, we'll watch a one-hour documentary on how Iceland "solved" their financial and political crisis, and see if this tiny country with merely 300,000 inhabitants is a good role model to follow, or if their solutions do not apply to the rest of the world with countries with millions and millions of citizens. Note that the documentary is biased, but it should still have some provoking thoughts worth discussing.
A fourth session, not announced yet, will cover a proposal for a democratic model suggested by someone who emigrated to... India, and found out that democracy, in India, means corruption. So he proposed a different model to elect representatives and keep them in check by the citizens. His model was never tried out in practice and might just be utopic; also, it's unknown if it might ever work outside India. But, once more, some of the ideas are worth discussing.
The times of events are deliberately not the same, to allow different people to be able to participate.
The events are also being announced on LL's internal event system, so I'm afraid I have to host them on a place in the CDS where I have permissions to announce events — namely, the Colonia Nova Amphitheatre.
More can be read on http://virtualgovernance.tk/2012/10/15/ ... tic-order/
Disclaimer to CDS citizens: NO, this is not ABOUT CDS, and has NOTHING to do whatsoever with OUR model for democracy In fact, the "Virtual Governance" group is sort of an old idea which had, as a purpose, to promote democracy in general, and show how we, CDSers, have so well implemented democratic values in our community for so long. Years ago we found out that the best thing we could "export" to the SL community at large were our democratic values, since that's something we're very good at. So it would make sense to locate organisations promoting democracy in general in the CDS, and announce public events. We did that for a while, when we had Rudy Ruml (Rudolph Rummel, Prof. Emeritus, and promoter of the "democracy peace" theory) as a resident organising seminars about democracies — back in 2006! Rudy sadly had some health issues and stayed away from SL for a long time; he's actually quite better by now, and continues to update all his many websites and blogs, but unfortunately, he never returned to SL or to the CDS...