LambdaMOO tried switching to democracy around 1993, with "LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction". Basically, the mods ("wizards") instituted a petition system for tec

LambdaMOO tried switching to democracy around 1993, with "LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction". Basically, the mods ("wizards") instituted a petition system for technical changes and ceded all social decisions to a separate arbitration board. The resulting three and a half years of chaos is summarized in the last post on http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/LambdaMOO http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/LambdaMOO In the end, the wizards published "LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction" and took back control, concluding: > Over the course of the past three and a half years, it has become obvious that this [refraining from making social decisions] was an impossible ideal: The line between 'technical' and 'social' is not a clear one, and never can be. A great deal has been written about this experiment (and a Web search will find much analysis, along with full text of LTAND and LTAND2), and there are a wide variety of perspectives on why LTAND failed, but one conclusion that nearly everybody seems to reach is that attempting to give a community democracy with no higher guidance is almost guaranteed to be a recipe for disaster. Reflecting on all of this, I have no idea how the US founders managed to get something that worked at all, much less as well as it does. (And notice that it took them several tries to get it right.)