Very great points Mac!Mac_Fife wrote:I had a bit of a rant about guilds, but I do think that what Jamey aspires to is worthwhile, provided that the scope is extended in the way that JWPlatt explained. What I see as being difficult, and is no doubt the crux of why Jamey posed the initial question, is that when Cyan sanctioned the use of the guild names they probably did so with some more or less vague idea of providing them with some guidance on how they would operate. As fan created content started to become a real possibility, the rules got fleshed out a bit. But that was when Cyan had funding to expend effort on such things. Now, the problem is, as Jamey asks, who can provide the oversight? The politics will likely make it very difficult to get consensus on appointing some body to act in Cyan's role. If you suggest that each group or guild can nominate a representative to serve on a council, then you'll have people who simply don't want to be part of any group either out in the cold or being a representative of a one-person group.
If a group doesn't like the way the oversight group is heading then it can just choose to ignore it. I don't immediately see any way around that problem, since within Open Source everything except obedience to the licences is voluntary.
What might help would be to start to bullet point the things that will actually benefit from co-ordination - think about the activities and forget the guild roles for now, and see where there might be logical break points. Kind of like breaking up a big software job - define the interfaces between each module and you don't need to worry about how each module works - so the same things could be done by multiple modules (guilds), each working to their own rules.
But the last paragraph had me a bit confused, are you saying that the community should set aside the label of guilds and positions, but still contribute their skills towards the growth of the community? Or do you mean that the guilds should break down into smaller sub-sections that each contribute small things? Or am I wrong on both parts and missed the point completely?
I sincerely apologize if I misunderstood the last paragraph, but everything else made complete sense to me