A Government Made of Guilds

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The game has a government in the form of guilds. In each guild, masters train apprentices and elect a spokesperson to represent the guild to all players. When you join a guild you become an apprentice and are assigned to a master. After a while you become a master and take on apprentices.

What is a guild?

The idea of a guild that I have in mind combines scholarship, professional tradecraft and self-governance. Guilds will organize themselves in terms of conduct and responsibility. They will define and impose criteria for membership and mastery. Most important, they must not be bureaucratic, exclusive nor secretive. Any guild that shows signs of neglecting its responsibility shall be investigated and offered assistance.

Currently, education is separated from the work environment. In contrast, guilds will expose students to the conditions in which they will eventually work. This will reduce the need for job hunting and interviews. They offer exposure to career activity early in life, when learning is easiest. Relationships of warmth and depth are intended to be long lasting.

Within each guild, scholarship and governance are strongly linked, resulting in greater understanding, efficiency and creativity in all areas of the guild's responsibilities.

Work and governance are currently separated, creating a need for unions, lobbies and other forms of contentious influence peddling where greed and emotions often play a role. By allowing guilds to govern themselves, through building ongoing consensus, we hope for less effort and more sanity.

Guilds have some negative connotations arising from the way guilds of the past have been exclusive and secretive. Tradesmen arriving in town would seek to join a guild and were often rejected and thus unable to make a decent living out of their skills. Guilds ignored a lot of outside influence, engendering frustration and rage. We are clear that we do not want to make these same mistakes in 2.0.

Any guild can have sub guilds, and further subdivide as needed. We like the idea that in each parent guild, the spokesperson is able to talk about all the sub guilds.

A variety of guilds

Each guild is created to fulfill a well-defined, widely expressed need. These needs are watched over and cared for by the Needs Guild. A guild has a clearly stated core responsibility to all players and acts as a single entity while doing this. Everyone in the guild works at some particular facet of it. They are encouraged to pursue anything which deeply inspires them. A guild is where we expect most of the designing of and thinking about 2.0 to take place.

A few examples: The justice guild is responsible for examining and resolving disputes and and providing ethical guidance to all guilds and players. The Needs Guild will manage a global needs tracking system, through which all players can search and into which they can submit requests. A dreams guild will help players identify their passions and provide guidance and resources for pursuing them. The security and stability guilds watch for and gently handle breaches, spirals out of control and hostile takeovers. The communities guild will provide resources to all communities which players create around neighborhoods and regions.

New guilds can form from any game-wide need that emerges. The guilds guild will somehow detect this and provide assistance for starting up the new guild. Some of this will be automated and the guilds guild is responsible for it being easy, simple, reliable and effective.

Inside a guild

A player joins a guild as an apprentice and seeks out or is assigned a master. The master will train their group of apprentices until each is deemed sufficiently skilled. The apprentice then become a master and takes on their own apprentices. Masters form a hierarchy of influence, guiding the guild.

A headmaster is selected according to how much trust and competence they have. The headmaster will agree to be available to make decisions whenever the guild can't form a consensus. At some point, the regard of another member will rise to the level of the headmaster, and between them they can decide if or when the duties shall transfer.