Quote:Original post by Paradigm Shifter
It depends on whether you consider taking over the world to be everyone playing your Hockey MMORPG written in HTML (with variables) and marrying the Incredible Hulk.

That... may be as good a definition as any. [lol]

Quote:Original post by Chadra
In open source government, the more you care the more say you have. This means that people who want to do nothing but think about Britney Spears all day can do so, but they don't get an equal say on constructing the school system as someone who really cares about about education.

The problem as I see it it will also disadvantage the people who want to do nothing but work hard to provide income to feed and support their children. Reading, understanding and proposing legislature involves skills and time most people don't have.

This system would favour the independently wealthy who have the time to devote to law making, or the funds to hire people to do the law making for them. The moneyed interests don't need to hunt out the representatives to corrupt, they can hire the manpower to directly corrupt the legistation themselves.

At the very least, it will be rather fun to watch this play out.

The only constructive input that I have at the moment is that you will want to make the web site scoring rules and operation themselves open for public revision. We've had bad experiences with electronic voting machines in the past, and people won't put a lot of trust behind a political system that's programmed by a small group of developers.

Quote:Original post by slayemin
In a world where nobody is hungry and everyone has what they want, the purpose for government is minimized...

- Most people will never have everything they want.
- Some people want other people, so they need to eliminate the other people's happiness to have their's.

The "nobody's hungry" thing can be done though.

Quote:Original post by slayemin
The problem with a game like this where the world governments are run from the web, everyone in the world would need to own a computer and there would also have to be some sort of age filter and idiot filter
...so you won't have six billion qualified players...

Nope. Check out the FAQ.

Concerning internet access, there are already more than a billion people with net access, and there are now several major projects to push internet connectivity and hardware out to the least developed regions of the world. Since the Metagovernment project doesn't plan on being fully live for more than a year (perhaps much more), the net landscape will be much different by then. And more importantly, net access is not required. Each government versionates once a year. Before that versioning, there is a public meeting. So anyone can attend the meeting where they will have access to computers and training.

Concerning children (etc.) participating: the scoring system handles that. Absolutely anyone can participate, and they are judged based on the community's opinions of their posts. The time deprecation system mitigates the long-term effects of bad scores. So if a kid gets a really low score, over time, as they mature and their posts get better, theiy are not still dragged down by their earlier scores.

In other words... think like a game developer! :) Any potential problems are really just obstacles that can be handled by tweaking the rules.

Oh, and concerning courts, they leave the local court systems in place. The open source governments are tools of legislation and bureaucracy.