Re: DIS: Non-email public fora

[omd]

I've been a regular user of a Discourse forum for a few years, since
the Rust language community deprecated their mailing list in favor of
a Discourse instance.

Discourse has the interesting property that it actively seeks to allow
users to use it *as* a mailing list: receiving one email per post, and
able to reply via email.  That sounds nice in theory, and in practice
I'm indeed able to use Gmail as my primary means of reading the forum.
But there are quite a few issues:

- Emails tend to be delayed by tens of minutes, so pure email users
will fall behind in real-time conversations.
- Formatting tends to get munged when replying by email (for this
reason I only use Gmail to read, and visit the website when I want to
reply).
- Discourse allows editing posts, but there's no email update when a
post is edited, so editing is very unfriendly to email users.
- By default there's a limit on max emails per day (so email users
just randomly miss messages), though admins can change the setting.
- Incoming email is HTML and surrounds the actual post with a big
header and footer.  At least Gmail automatically hides the footer.

On the other hand, custom hosted instance may be able to mitigate some
of those issues.  (Discourse is open source; Rust's instance is hosted
by Discourse itself, but you can also run your own.)  For example,
emails being delayed is probably fixable, post editing could be
forbidden, and the header/footer format could be changed.

And Discourse's web interface is *quite* nice, nicer than any other
web forum I've seen...

But I wish there were an option that took mailing list support more
seriously, while having a similarly nice web interface.

By the way, I tried years ago to migrate Agora's lists to Mailman 3;
its web interface is nowhere near comparable to Discourse, but it's at
least significantly nicer than the current Mailman 2, including
allowing users to send messages from the web.  Example instance:

https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-us...@mailman3.org/

But some people replied at the time saying they liked the existing
archive interface... and while it should be technically feasible to
keep both as an option, I didn't have enough energy to set that up.
Maybe I could do better if I tried again.

Re: DIS: Non-email public fora

[Owen Jacobson]

Hi folks!

A few months ago, I posted this:

On Feb 25, 2019, at 7:15 PM, Owen Jacobson  wrote:

> However, the use of email (and the use of email distribution lists, in 
> particular) is far out of favour on the internet at large. While most people 
> can be taught to operate mailman and how to effectively participate in an 
> email distribution list discussion, those skills are no longer as prevalent 
> in the internet userbase as they may once have been. This shows up for Agora 
> in terms of people failing to subscribe, or failing to understand where their 
> messages have gone, and it probably shows up in terms of potential players we 
> never hear about because they completely fail the initial task of “subscribe 
> to the list” without asking for help.
> 
> (Lurking in Freenode’s ##nomic has convinced me that that barrier exists, at 
> least for some users.)
> 
> With that in mind, I have two questions.
> 
> 1. What, if any, web-based discussion systems would be effective for 
> supporting Agora as it is today?
> 
> I did a cursory survey of the state of the art, and it appears that web-based 
> discussions are dominated by:
> 
> * Discus, for discussions associated with some parent document (generally a 
> blog post or news item),
> * Discourse, for open-ended discussion venues dedicated to specific subject 
> matter, and
> * Social Media (as exemplified by Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit), for 
> freeform conversation.
> 
> None of these exactly map to the forum criteria established in Rule 478: 
> Discus, for example, imposes a tree-shaped interface, and provides a 
> completely separate discussion for each parent document, while social media 
> systems invariably interpose some kind of attention-seeking algorithmic 
> ordering, and often algorithmic *removal*, between author and reader. It 
> would be quite hard to collate out a single, chronological list of messages 
> (required by the final paragraph of Rule 478) from any of those systems.
> 
> 2. What, if anything, would need to be amended to allow something like Agora 
> to be played in a venue other than email?
> 
> My real motivation here is to find ways to adapt Agora’s decision-making 
> systems for other use cases. I think Agora’s model of asynchronous 
> deliberation, its system of votes, AI, and document power ratings, and its 
> mechanisms for inclusion are a powerful alternative to the kinds of chaos I 
> run into when organizing gaming groups, and I’ve got a personal interest in 
> trying to use it to structure a user-owned cooperative enterprise in another 
> sphere.

This eventually evolved into The Surface and Orbit Authority, a club for the 
game Space Engineers. The club’s charter(1) is heavily based on Agora’s ruleset 
(to the point that an Agoran would quickly fit right in), and we ended up using 
Discourse as a public forum(2).

1: https://lithobrake.club/ 
2: https://talk.lithobrake.club/ 

We’ve been operating this way since March, and I’m starting to work on a 
“lessons learned” article. I thought I’d share back a few thoughts.

In the course of drafting the original charter(3), I made a few important 
changes. First, I stripped out the “ephemeral” parts of Agora’s rules - the 
minigames and systems that have come into being while and since I was a regular 
player and which I expect will eventually pass from the ruleset. This left a 
“core ruleset” covering Agora’s longer-lived subjects - that is, passing and 
enforcing rules.

3: https://lithobrake.club/en/2019-03-07/ 


Second, while Agora’s focus is the rules themselves, the Surface and Orbit 
Authority’s focus is facilitating cooperation around another service. Agora’s 
ruleset provides a number of handles designed to facilitate rule disputes, 
principally including calls for judgement. By existing, I felt that those 
handles in turn encourage rules disputes as a core gameplay activity - they are 
a large part of what makes Agora what it is. I removed calls for judgement 
entirely, and stripped the Referee subsystem down to a direct voting 
disciplinary action system with only three meaningful outcomes(4).

4: https://lithobrake.club/en/2019-03-07/articles/discipline/ 


Third, I went over the rules and reworded them. At the time, I didn’t fully 
understand how Agora’s use of language has evolved over the years to try to, 
variously, predict and prevent disputes about interpretation, or to leave open 
the option of narrow but unexpected interpretations (scams), so the result is 
not fully satisfying to me, but it was a good opportunity to mitigate the 
intellectual property risks of reusing Agora’s rules and to ensure that the 
phrasing is consistent. I also ended up refactoring a few rules - changes I 
intent to propose back to Agora, including fully defining IRV voting and a 
reorganization and generalization of 

Re: DIS: Non-email public fora

[Kerim Aydin]

On 2/26/2019 3:34 PM, Owen Jacobson wrote:

Do you happen to know which MUD platform Nomic World was based on? Some -
LambdaMOO comes to mind - are far more amenable to this sort of use case
than, say, Diku or River would have been.


I don't remember - this was a time where there was an active MUD/MOO
development community and many forks (I was involved in a project porting
one to VAX/VMS, of all things)- I know we called the Nomic World platform a
MUD not a MOO.  The hosts were very restrictive on permissions - there were
only a couple of people with mod/wizard powers, so most of us never worked
with the code at all.

This caused many gameplay issues, as Steve notes in eir Final Verdict here,
with the opinion that email play is better than MUD play:
http://www.nomic.net/deadgames/nomicworld/norrish/
Though I think the problems e mentions are surmountable with Rules that
better account for the "physical reality" of the MUD environment.


It regularly saddens me that modern internet social spaces are so
viscerally non-programmable in the way things like IRC and MUDs once were.
Not everyone is at ease expressing themselves in code, but excluding
people from doing so entirely both limits expressiveness and sharply
limits communities’ ability to reshape their spaces to suit their needs.


Worth noting then a little more-lost history then!  In 2004-2005 (I think)
one of the players - I forget whom - set up a LambdaMOO flavor as an Agoran
MOO.  This was the other end of the permissions spectrum - all players were
wizards.  We started it as a Discussion forum only.  Then (about 5-6 of us)
started to build.  and learn lambdamoo code.  and program.  and debug.  and
build some more.  We had an Agoran town square (complete with Fountain),
groves, a marketplace, and pleasant avenues, and the de rigueur mysterious
cave system.  And lots of Agora-themed programmed objects to play with.

But basically we spent so much time programming and showing off our toys to
each other in sandbox mode that we never got around to making Rules changes
to allow actual Agoran play to go on over there.  Eventually it just went
like IRC, people stopped hanging out there.  The presence of all the unused
buildings, when almost no one was there, made it feel even *more* abandoned
than IRC.  Eventually the host lost interest and took it down.  Though it
*was* great fun for the builders while we were doing it!

So between Steve's experience and that later MOO, there's definitely some
balance to be struck!

-G.

Re: DIS: Non-email public fora

[Reuben Staley]

On 2/26/19 4:34 PM, Owen Jacobson wrote> Reuben Staley 
 also wrote:



Along the same line, we have the distribution system of proposals. This goes 
along with (1), but is still worth mentioning. In most other Nomics, proposals 
are immediately put up for voting since one post can represent a proposal. Of 
course, this is not something that would definitely have to go; it's not hard 
to imagine a blog-based Nomic in which proposals are distributed all at once.


Agora’s propose-then-distribute-then-vote model closely mirrors how proposals 
are resolved in systems like Robert’s Rules, which are designed to be effective 
up to the 200-person deliberative scale. That a cut-down version is effective 
in Agora is not surprising, but I think it is important. The immediacy of 
decisions in other nomics reflects the immediacy of, say, a pull request, and 
probably puts similar pressures on people to make snap decisions, whereas the 
more structured schedule Agora uses gives people a deliberate and 
widely-agreed-upon window of time to consider and respond before the 
opportunity to give input closes.


In most other nomics I've played, I haven't noticed the *need* for such 
deliberation. Rarely has there been proposal in other more ephemeral 
nomics that really needed more that the standard 48-96 hours of 
discussion about whether or not it would be a good idea. Agora has more 
of these than other games, sure, but even here, they're rather uncommon. 
Most proposals could probably be resolved here in a matter of days.



You’ve made a strong argument that no current web-based discussion system is a 
good match _as shipped,_ though. None of them include the idea of gathering up 
and regularly publishing digests of important subjects (proposals, in this 
case). It’s something the users can do, just as we do with email on Agora, 
instead, perhaps.


It's not as if we don't have any options at all to implement a 
digest-system, though. G.'s reply to this thread presents a rather good 
method to keep our reports system mostly intact, for instance.



Reuben Staley  also wrote:


Now, let's discuss potential new forums for Agora. I believe that a bulletin 
board would be the best way to continue playing Agora should it be moved. 
Agoran threads get very long very fast, and a bulletin board would show every 
comment response. Gamestate tracking could be relegated to a specific category 
of posts; as could proposals and maybe even minigames. This may just be my 
personal opinion about bulletin boards being the best out of the current ways 
to play Nomic; however, I do honestly believe it would be the best way to go.

I hope this helps you with your research, o.



Thank you, it very much does.

Remember, my intention is not to move Agora. I like Agora where it is, and 
would personally vote against proposals (or try to oust officers) that attempt 
to move it to a web forum, absent an extremely compelling reason to change or a 
patent and obvious shift in the culture of the game. I’m looking at ways to 
extract useful tools from Agora to apply to other groups - particularly, groups 
where I see that consensus mechanisms either don’t exist or have broken down 
entirely.


I would also vote against such proposals, and I understand your 
intention behind this thread. As a self-proclaimed nomic scholor, I am 
rather curious to see how you implement this data.


--
Trigon

Re: DIS: Non-email public fora

[Owen Jacobson]

Reuben Staley  wrote:

> The main manifestation of Agora's adaptation is reports. In BlogNomic, the 
> Ruleset page on the wiki and the GNDT do most of the tracking, whereas in 
> Agora, we publish the information every week because we can't keep a 
> constantly changing record. If we were to transition off a mailing list, 
> Reports would be one of the first mechanics to go.

That’s a surprisingly apt insight. Thank you. One of the motivations behind the 
stuff I’m working on is teaching groups of technical folks to think beyond JIRA 
fields in terms of how to communicate decisions (before, and during, and 
after). It hadn’t quite struck me that Agora’s reporting system fills in a 
necessary role that might not survive outside of mailing lists specifically, 
but that helps me reason about why teams that have mandated information 
reporting systems often struggle with them: those tools often _aren’t_ designed 
around the team’s actual needs.

Reuben Staley  also wrote:

> Along the same line, we have the distribution system of proposals. This goes 
> along with (1), but is still worth mentioning. In most other Nomics, 
> proposals are immediately put up for voting since one post can represent a 
> proposal. Of course, this is not something that would definitely have to go; 
> it's not hard to imagine a blog-based Nomic in which proposals are 
> distributed all at once.

Agora’s propose-then-distribute-then-vote model closely mirrors how proposals 
are resolved in systems like Robert’s Rules, which are designed to be effective 
up to the 200-person deliberative scale. That a cut-down version is effective 
in Agora is not surprising, but I think it is important. The immediacy of 
decisions in other nomics reflects the immediacy of, say, a pull request, and 
probably puts similar pressures on people to make snap decisions, whereas the 
more structured schedule Agora uses gives people a deliberate and 
widely-agreed-upon window of time to consider and respond before the 
opportunity to give input closes.

You’ve made a strong argument that no current web-based discussion system is a 
good match _as shipped,_ though. None of them include the idea of gathering up 
and regularly publishing digests of important subjects (proposals, in this 
case). It’s something the users can do, just as we do with email on Agora, 
instead, perhaps.

Reuben Staley  also wrote:

> Now, let's discuss potential new forums for Agora. I believe that a bulletin 
> board would be the best way to continue playing Agora should it be moved. 
> Agoran threads get very long very fast, and a bulletin board would show every 
> comment response. Gamestate tracking could be relegated to a specific 
> category of posts; as could proposals and maybe even minigames. This may just 
> be my personal opinion about bulletin boards being the best out of the 
> current ways to play Nomic; however, I do honestly believe it would be the 
> best way to go.
> 
> I hope this helps you with your research, o.


Thank you, it very much does.

Remember, my intention is not to move Agora. I like Agora where it is, and 
would personally vote against proposals (or try to oust officers) that attempt 
to move it to a web forum, absent an extremely compelling reason to change or a 
patent and obvious shift in the culture of the game. I’m looking at ways to 
extract useful tools from Agora to apply to other groups - particularly, groups 
where I see that consensus mechanisms either don’t exist or have broken down 
entirely.

Kerim Aydin  wrote:

> I always thought the MUD (Nomic World) was the best place to play nomic in.
> Because you could have all three of (1) real-time conversation, (2) message
> boards for long threads and (3) automated systems, smoothly linked in a
> single environment with user authentication, and you could adjust the
> balance of types of interactions on the fly.

Do you happen to know which MUD platform Nomic World was based on? Some - 
LambdaMOO comes to mind - are far more amenable to this sort of use case than, 
say, Diku or River would have been.

It regularly saddens me that modern internet social spaces are so viscerally 
non-programmable in the way things like IRC and MUDs once were. Not everyone is 
at ease expressing themselves in code, but excluding people from doing so 
entirely both limits expressiveness and sharply limits communities’ ability to 
reshape their spaces to suit their needs. I’ve been chewing on the idea of a 
web-based MOO-alike for a while, and it seems obvious that that’d be a fit for 
a Nomic for the reasons you lay out.

Kerim Aydin  also wrote:

> ITT one essential ingredient of Agora-style nomic play is that we use
> natural language to Do Things.  It might be tempting to start automating a
> bunch of stuff, and some automation is good, but half of what we do is find
> clever ways to say we do things under the constraints of language and
> written communication.  So a key feature to preserve is "keep 

Re: DIS: Non-email public fora

[Cuddle Beam]

Woo! Yes, I agree entirely. I’ve brought up these arguments before as well
lol.

Although, Discus/Discourse are pretty obscure.

Discord is pretty good and the current mainstream for gaming, and a
growingly popular media for nomics (Infinite Nomic and Now we Nomic are
there)! It doesn’t favor essay-length replies though but it’s an extremely
agile and powerful platform, it’s basically IRC on super-steroids.

Although, if Agora is housed there and it really catches on, I believe it
would start to be populated by people and chatter that is a lot less
serious and academic than the usual Agora, because of the
younger/anonymous/less mature demography of Discord users. Infinite Nomic
is a great example of this, and its got a lot more activity than the
serious (and dying) Now we Nomic - it’s got loads of fun, casual chat and
banter. It has also got extra misc channels and bots like ones for
videogames or porn - which in the dominant and juvenile Doritos-and-Mtn-Dew
culture around gaming and Discord, having stuff like that is status quo.

I don’t think housing Agora in Discord would be good, but imo the IRC chat
should be updated to be a Discord server instead - or at least a Slack
server like BN has, which is funcionally identical to Discord but it has a
much more professional connotation.

On Tue, 26 Feb 2019 at 01:15, Owen Jacobson  wrote:

> Hi Agorans! Please put the pitchforks down - I’m here with a question, not
> a request.
>
> It’s my view that the Rules and the structural properties of the fora in
> which Agora is played have a sympathetic relationship with one another. The
> Rules and CFJ case law combine to treat email as the preferred format for
> playing Agora, and in turn email contains properties that make it uniquely
> attractive to Agora’s players.
>
> Rule 478 (“Fora”) sets out the basic requirements for an Agoran forum:
>
> >   Freedom of speech being essential for the healthy functioning of
> >   any non-Imperial nomic, it is hereby resolved that no Player shall
> >   be prohibited from participating in the Fora, nor shall any person
> >   create physical or technological obstacles that unduly favor some
> >   players' fora access over others.
>
> A forum must, in technical implementation, be reasonably equitable,
>
> >   Each player should ensure e can receive messages via each public
> >   forum.
>
> It is the responsibility of each player to ensure that they can view each
> fora, before it is the responsibility of the forum’s operator to ensure the
> players can view the forum they operate,
>
> >   A public message is a message sent via a public forum, or sent to
> >   all players and containing a clear designation of intent to be
> >   public. A rule can also designate that a part of one public
> >   message is considered a public message in its own right. A person
> >   "publishes" or "announces" something by sending a public message.
>
> A forum is a collection of messages, which may include sub-messages,
>
> are collectively a pretty good description of the email system, as
> deployed on the internet.
>
> However, the use of email (and the use of email distribution lists, in
> particular) is far out of favour on the internet at large. While most
> people can be taught to operate mailman and how to effectively participate
> in an email distribution list discussion, those skills are no longer as
> prevalent in the internet userbase as they may once have been. This shows
> up for Agora in terms of people failing to subscribe, or failing to
> understand where their messages have gone, and it probably shows up in
> terms of potential players we never hear about because they completely fail
> the initial task of “subscribe to the list” without asking for help.
>
> (Lurking in Freenode’s ##nomic has convinced me that that barrier exists,
> at least for some users.)
>
> With that in mind, I have two questions.
>
> 1. What, if any, web-based discussion systems would be effective for
> supporting Agora as it is today?
>
> I did a cursory survey of the state of the art, and it appears that
> web-based discussions are dominated by:
>
> * Discus, for discussions associated with some parent document (generally
> a blog post or news item),
> * Discourse, for open-ended discussion venues dedicated to specific
> subject matter, and
> * Social Media (as exemplified by Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit), for
> freeform conversation.
>
> None of these exactly map to the forum criteria established in Rule 478:
> Discus, for example, imposes a tree-shaped interface, and provides a
> completely separate discussion for each parent document, while social media
> systems invariably interpose some kind of attention-seeking algorithmic
> ordering, and often algorithmic *removal*, between author and reader. It
> would be quite hard to collate out a single, chronological list of messages
> (required by the final paragraph of Rule 478) from any of those systems.
>
> 2. 

Re: DIS: Non-email public fora

[Kerim Aydin]

Hi, o!

I always thought the MUD (Nomic World) was the best place to play nomic in.
Because you could have all three of (1) real-time conversation, (2) message
boards for long threads and (3) automated systems, smoothly linked in a
single environment with user authentication, and you could adjust the
balance of types of interactions on the fly.

ITT one essential ingredient of Agora-style nomic play is that we use
natural language to Do Things.  It might be tempting to start automating a
bunch of stuff, and some automation is good, but half of what we do is find
clever ways to say we do things under the constraints of language and
written communication.  So a key feature to preserve is "keep conversations
intact, and keep the actions as part of the conversations".

As an exercise, if you wanted to move Agora to a wholly different medium
with minimal rules modification, I think it would be quite easy to move to a
more blog-post like system, provided that message replies are kept
sequential (no ranking mechanism) at first.

To begin with, you'd just need a slight Rules tweak - make a new blog post
each day, and the official forum moves to be replies to that day's thread.
Almost exactly the same as now, entirely sequential conversation.  Then,
once moved in, you can start migrating rules you no longer need - reports
have been mentioned, but having parallel threads for each proposal/CFJ -
those things could be implemented Rule-by-rule as you go.  It seems pretty
straightforward to give proposals, CFJs, etc. a new initiation method, "by
blog post" rather than "by announcement", with some thinking about handling
simultaneous events.

-G.

On 2/25/2019 4:15 PM, Owen Jacobson wrote:

Hi Agorans! Please put the pitchforks down - I’m here with a question, not a 
request.

It’s my view that the Rules and the structural properties of the fora in which 
Agora is played have a sympathetic relationship with one another. The Rules and 
CFJ case law combine to treat email as the preferred format for playing Agora, 
and in turn email contains properties that make it uniquely attractive to 
Agora’s players.

Rule 478 (“Fora”) sets out the basic requirements for an Agoran forum:


   Freedom of speech being essential for the healthy functioning of
   any non-Imperial nomic, it is hereby resolved that no Player shall
   be prohibited from participating in the Fora, nor shall any person
   create physical or technological obstacles that unduly favor some
   players' fora access over others.
   
A forum must, in technical implementation, be reasonably equitable,



   Each player should ensure e can receive messages via each public
   forum.


It is the responsibility of each player to ensure that they can view each fora, 
before it is the responsibility of the forum’s operator to ensure the players 
can view the forum they operate,


   A public message is a message sent via a public forum, or sent to
   all players and containing a clear designation of intent to be
   public. A rule can also designate that a part of one public
   message is considered a public message in its own right. A person
   "publishes" or "announces" something by sending a public message.
   
A forum is a collection of messages, which may include sub-messages,


are collectively a pretty good description of the email system, as deployed on 
the internet.

However, the use of email (and the use of email distribution lists, in 
particular) is far out of favour on the internet at large. While most people 
can be taught to operate mailman and how to effectively participate in an email 
distribution list discussion, those skills are no longer as prevalent in the 
internet userbase as they may once have been. This shows up for Agora in terms 
of people failing to subscribe, or failing to understand where their messages 
have gone, and it probably shows up in terms of potential players we never hear 
about because they completely fail the initial task of “subscribe to the list” 
without asking for help.

(Lurking in Freenode’s ##nomic has convinced me that that barrier exists, at 
least for some users.)

With that in mind, I have two questions.

1. What, if any, web-based discussion systems would be effective for supporting 
Agora as it is today?

I did a cursory survey of the state of the art, and it appears that web-based 
discussions are dominated by:

* Discus, for discussions associated with some parent document (generally a 
blog post or news item),
* Discourse, for open-ended discussion venues dedicated to specific subject 
matter, and
* Social Media (as exemplified by Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit), for freeform 
conversation.

None of these exactly map to the forum criteria established in Rule 478: 
Discus, for example, imposes a tree-shaped interface, and provides a completely 
separate discussion for each parent document, while social media systems 
invariably interpose some kind of 

Re: DIS: Non-email public fora

[Gaelan Steele]

Speaking of which, I own the agronomic Google Group if we ever want to set that 
up as a backup.

Gaelan

> On Feb 25, 2019, at 8:59 PM, Reuben Staley  wrote:
> 
> One key trait of Nomic that comes from its main spin as a game built around 
> rule changes is adaptability. I am of the opinion that, as of right now, 
> there is no perfect forum on which to play Nomic, but Nomic can and, with a 
> reasonably wise group of players who each have the strengths and limitations 
> of the forum in question in mind, will become more suited to its environment.
> 
> Agora, in its over twenty years of history, has adapted to the mailing list 
> format because it had to to facilitate play. Emails are messages that can 
> either be long or short, but that cannot be changed after they are sent. So 
> we had to work around that.
> 
> The main manifestation of Agora's adaptation is reports. In BlogNomic, the 
> Ruleset page on the wiki and the GNDT do most of the tracking, whereas in 
> Agora, we publish the information every week because we can't keep a 
> constantly changing record. If we were to transition off a mailing list, 
> Reports would be one of the first mechanics to go.
> 
> Along the same line, we have the distribution system of proposals. This goes 
> along with (1), but is still worth mentioning. In most other Nomics, 
> proposals are immediately put up for voting since one post can represent a 
> proposal. Of course, this is not something that would definitely have to go; 
> it's not hard to imagine a blog-based Nomic in which proposals are 
> distributed all at once.
> 
> Now, there are many issues with the idea of moving a Nomic platform. Suppose 
> that the mail server went offline one day and a group of Agorans got together 
> off-list to figure out what to do. Chances are, not everyone would agree on 
> everything. It seems to me that there's a non-negligible chance that Agora 
> would split into multiple games at that point, each one claiming to be the 
> true successor to Agora in the same way FRC and Agora itself argue about who 
> is the worthy successor to Nomic World.
> 
> Another point: remember how I said Nomic is adaptable? Well, I would like to 
> add an important clarification: Nomic is adaptable, but it adapts slowly. 
> It's likely that some forks of Agora would die out before they finished 
> adapting to the new platform because it would just be so hard to play in its 
> current state.
> 
> Now, let's discuss potential new forums for Agora. I believe that a bulletin 
> board would be the best way to continue playing Agora should it be moved. 
> Agoran threads get very long very fast, and a bulletin board would show every 
> comment response. Gamestate tracking could be relegated to a specific 
> category of posts; as could proposals and maybe even minigames. This may just 
> be my personal opinion about bulletin boards being the best out of the 
> current ways to play Nomic; however, I do honestly believe it would be the 
> best way to go.
> 
> I hope this helps you with your research, o.
> 
> On 2/25/19 5:15 PM, Owen Jacobson wrote:
>> Hi Agorans! Please put the pitchforks down - I’m here with a question, not a 
>> request.
>> It’s my view that the Rules and the structural properties of the fora in 
>> which Agora is played have a sympathetic relationship with one another. The 
>> Rules and CFJ case law combine to treat email as the preferred format for 
>> playing Agora, and in turn email contains properties that make it uniquely 
>> attractive to Agora’s players.
>> Rule 478 (“Fora”) sets out the basic requirements for an Agoran forum:
>>>   Freedom of speech being essential for the healthy functioning of
>>>   any non-Imperial nomic, it is hereby resolved that no Player shall
>>>   be prohibited from participating in the Fora, nor shall any person
>>>   create physical or technological obstacles that unduly favor some
>>>   players' fora access over others.
>>   A forum must, in technical implementation, be reasonably equitable,
>>>   Each player should ensure e can receive messages via each public
>>>   forum.
>> It is the responsibility of each player to ensure that they can view each 
>> fora, before it is the responsibility of the forum’s operator to ensure the 
>> players can view the forum they operate,
>>>   A public message is a message sent via a public forum, or sent to
>>>   all players and containing a clear designation of intent to be
>>>   public. A rule can also designate that a part of one public
>>>   message is considered a public message in its own right. A person
>>>   "publishes" or "announces" something by sending a public message.
>>   A forum is a collection of messages, which may include sub-messages,
>> are collectively a pretty good description of the email system, as deployed 
>> on the internet.
>> However, the use of email (and the use of email distribution lists, in 
>> particular) is far out of 

Re: DIS: Non-email public fora

[Reuben Staley]

One key trait of Nomic that comes from its main spin as a game built 
around rule changes is adaptability. I am of the opinion that, as of 
right now, there is no perfect forum on which to play Nomic, but Nomic 
can and, with a reasonably wise group of players who each have the 
strengths and limitations of the forum in question in mind, will become 
more suited to its environment.


Agora, in its over twenty years of history, has adapted to the mailing 
list format because it had to to facilitate play. Emails are messages 
that can either be long or short, but that cannot be changed after they 
are sent. So we had to work around that.


The main manifestation of Agora's adaptation is reports. In BlogNomic, 
the Ruleset page on the wiki and the GNDT do most of the tracking, 
whereas in Agora, we publish the information every week because we can't 
keep a constantly changing record. If we were to transition off a 
mailing list, Reports would be one of the first mechanics to go.


Along the same line, we have the distribution system of proposals. This 
goes along with (1), but is still worth mentioning. In most other 
Nomics, proposals are immediately put up for voting since one post can 
represent a proposal. Of course, this is not something that would 
definitely have to go; it's not hard to imagine a blog-based Nomic in 
which proposals are distributed all at once.


Now, there are many issues with the idea of moving a Nomic platform. 
Suppose that the mail server went offline one day and a group of Agorans 
got together off-list to figure out what to do. Chances are, not 
everyone would agree on everything. It seems to me that there's a 
non-negligible chance that Agora would split into multiple games at that 
point, each one claiming to be the true successor to Agora in the same 
way FRC and Agora itself argue about who is the worthy successor to 
Nomic World.


Another point: remember how I said Nomic is adaptable? Well, I would 
like to add an important clarification: Nomic is adaptable, but it 
adapts slowly. It's likely that some forks of Agora would die out before 
they finished adapting to the new platform because it would just be so 
hard to play in its current state.


Now, let's discuss potential new forums for Agora. I believe that a 
bulletin board would be the best way to continue playing Agora should it 
be moved. Agoran threads get very long very fast, and a bulletin board 
would show every comment response. Gamestate tracking could be relegated 
to a specific category of posts; as could proposals and maybe even 
minigames. This may just be my personal opinion about bulletin boards 
being the best out of the current ways to play Nomic; however, I do 
honestly believe it would be the best way to go.


I hope this helps you with your research, o.

On 2/25/19 5:15 PM, Owen Jacobson wrote:

Hi Agorans! Please put the pitchforks down - I’m here with a question, not a 
request.

It’s my view that the Rules and the structural properties of the fora in which 
Agora is played have a sympathetic relationship with one another. The Rules and 
CFJ case law combine to treat email as the preferred format for playing Agora, 
and in turn email contains properties that make it uniquely attractive to 
Agora’s players.

Rule 478 (“Fora”) sets out the basic requirements for an Agoran forum:


   Freedom of speech being essential for the healthy functioning of
   any non-Imperial nomic, it is hereby resolved that no Player shall
   be prohibited from participating in the Fora, nor shall any person
   create physical or technological obstacles that unduly favor some
   players' fora access over others.
   
A forum must, in technical implementation, be reasonably equitable,



   Each player should ensure e can receive messages via each public
   forum.


It is the responsibility of each player to ensure that they can view each fora, 
before it is the responsibility of the forum’s operator to ensure the players 
can view the forum they operate,


   A public message is a message sent via a public forum, or sent to
   all players and containing a clear designation of intent to be
   public. A rule can also designate that a part of one public
   message is considered a public message in its own right. A person
   "publishes" or "announces" something by sending a public message.
   
A forum is a collection of messages, which may include sub-messages,


are collectively a pretty good description of the email system, as deployed on 
the internet.

However, the use of email (and the use of email distribution lists, in 
particular) is far out of favour on the internet at large. While most people 
can be taught to operate mailman and how to effectively participate in an email 
distribution list discussion, those skills are no longer as prevalent in the 
internet userbase as they may once have been. This shows up for Agora in terms 
of people failing to subscribe, 

DIS: Non-email public fora

[Owen Jacobson]

Hi Agorans! Please put the pitchforks down - I’m here with a question, not a 
request.

It’s my view that the Rules and the structural properties of the fora in which 
Agora is played have a sympathetic relationship with one another. The Rules and 
CFJ case law combine to treat email as the preferred format for playing Agora, 
and in turn email contains properties that make it uniquely attractive to 
Agora’s players.

Rule 478 (“Fora”) sets out the basic requirements for an Agoran forum:

>   Freedom of speech being essential for the healthy functioning of
>   any non-Imperial nomic, it is hereby resolved that no Player shall
>   be prohibited from participating in the Fora, nor shall any person
>   create physical or technological obstacles that unduly favor some
>   players' fora access over others.
  
A forum must, in technical implementation, be reasonably equitable,

>   Each player should ensure e can receive messages via each public
>   forum.

It is the responsibility of each player to ensure that they can view each fora, 
before it is the responsibility of the forum’s operator to ensure the players 
can view the forum they operate,

>   A public message is a message sent via a public forum, or sent to
>   all players and containing a clear designation of intent to be
>   public. A rule can also designate that a part of one public
>   message is considered a public message in its own right. A person
>   "publishes" or "announces" something by sending a public message.
  
A forum is a collection of messages, which may include sub-messages,

are collectively a pretty good description of the email system, as deployed on 
the internet.

However, the use of email (and the use of email distribution lists, in 
particular) is far out of favour on the internet at large. While most people 
can be taught to operate mailman and how to effectively participate in an email 
distribution list discussion, those skills are no longer as prevalent in the 
internet userbase as they may once have been. This shows up for Agora in terms 
of people failing to subscribe, or failing to understand where their messages 
have gone, and it probably shows up in terms of potential players we never hear 
about because they completely fail the initial task of “subscribe to the list” 
without asking for help.

(Lurking in Freenode’s ##nomic has convinced me that that barrier exists, at 
least for some users.)

With that in mind, I have two questions.

1. What, if any, web-based discussion systems would be effective for supporting 
Agora as it is today?

I did a cursory survey of the state of the art, and it appears that web-based 
discussions are dominated by:

* Discus, for discussions associated with some parent document (generally a 
blog post or news item),
* Discourse, for open-ended discussion venues dedicated to specific subject 
matter, and
* Social Media (as exemplified by Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit), for freeform 
conversation.

None of these exactly map to the forum criteria established in Rule 478: 
Discus, for example, imposes a tree-shaped interface, and provides a completely 
separate discussion for each parent document, while social media systems 
invariably interpose some kind of attention-seeking algorithmic ordering, and 
often algorithmic *removal*, between author and reader. It would be quite hard 
to collate out a single, chronological list of messages (required by the final 
paragraph of Rule 478) from any of those systems.

2. What, if anything, would need to be amended to allow something like Agora to 
be played in a venue other than email?

My real motivation here is to find ways to adapt Agora’s decision-making 
systems for other use cases. I think Agora’s model of asynchronous 
deliberation, its system of votes, AI, and document power ratings, and its 
mechanisms for inclusion are a powerful alternative to the kinds of chaos I run 
into when organizing gaming groups, and I’ve got a personal interest in trying 
to use it to structure a user-owned cooperative enterprise in another sphere.

-o