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Pat,
We can't just take stuff out of the constitution to make it more accessible and readable without making up for that in secondary legislation.
In any case, I don't intend to develop a blueprint on my own and then present it for approval. Im sure the RA will discuss this, arrive at some kind of consensus as to what it wishes to do - and we'll take it from there.
Michel
I think this whole topic is hazy to say the least but on the topic of non-land-owning persons being citizens, such a provision would be unconstitutional as Pat has pointed out, and thus void.
What does "owning land" in the CDS even mean however? In the original setup before the sim management changes, a [b:29fkxpq2]group[/b:29fkxpq2] owned the land, not the individual (although I understand it is now possible for individuals to "buy" land from the sim owner.)
In my case, I don't own any land in N'Stadt at all, but the [i:29fkxpq2]group[/i:29fkxpq2] for my store does ("BLACK"). Typically, this used to mean that my land owning group was a front of sorts for myself as an individual and the members of the group were alts. But what if they are not alts? Are those avatars citizens of CDS? Am I? I think they aren't and I am, but it's far from clear. We can't really base something as important as citizenship on an "understanding" that a group "really" means an individual and that only one individual in that group is "really" a citizen can we?
Also, what about those avatars that own a simple 4x4 square of prim land? Are they citizens? By the current rules yes they are (or their group is), but again this is hardly clear.
There have been long discussions about how unfair it would be to have votes predicated on land. Currently if this was the case, Michel and the others from the Roma sim would basically rule in Colonia Nova due to their large land ownership and that would not be fair. At the same time however, with the current system, a dozen or so individual avatars with no real investment in the CDS and no day to day presence in our community could buy up a series of tiny plots and have an influence on elections completely disproportionate to their input into the community.
I don't have any solutions personally other than to suggest as I have in the past that citizenship should be more precisely determined in our founding documents and possibly graduated rather than absolute, but these suggestions have rarely been agreed with. (especially the later one).
I would like to see a more flexible definition of what a citizen is with different kinds of citizenship that each have different privileges. For instance it would be nice, (and also very good for our struggling economy), to allow people to have businesses in the CDS without necessarily becoming a citizen. I have talked to many people over the past year or so that would [i:29fkxpq2]love[/i:29fkxpq2] to have a store in the CDS but are not sure about the whole "government thing." Many were just looking for a small stall or a vendor to rent, something currently impossible by our rules but otherwise common across Second Life.
Unfortunately in the CDS you have to buy a fairly large piece of land in a dense build, then you have to buy a second or third piece of prim land to support the store. This is a very large bar to commercial investment.
[quote="michelmanen":14or52j5]Pat,
We can't just take stuff out of the constitution to make it more accessible and readable without making up for that in secondary legislation.[/quote:14or52j5]
Michel, I think the difficulty was that your otherwise simplifying draft of the citizenship clauses [b:14or52j5]added[/b:14or52j5] a provision, "owns any land in the CDS [i:14or52j5]or the equivalent as determined by CDS legislation[/i:14or52j5]" (emphasis added). Group ownership of land, by statute, extends citizenship to each member of the group so long as the group holds 128m2 per member. How those group members pay for it (e.g. one or more pay in Lindens, starving artisans pay in spectacular builds) is up to the group. There isn't any "equivalent" to owning land, but how that ownership is held could be by individual or by group.
Dianne,
Microplots are , except for two grandfathered examples, gone. Per the Microplot Abolition Act 128m2 is now the minimum citizenship standard.
It's still not a big investment, granted, but at least it's now $1.?? US a month instead of 9 cents. When I think of citizenship "rights" I tend to think of political rights rather than land/prim use rights.
As to the question of stores, if one wants a small plot one isn't going to have much of a prim allocation. I don't see any way around that. Am I right that you're suggesting some mechanism to allow commercial entities to hold a small amount of land without having voting or other political rights?