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We had a discussion in here about guilds the night of March 1. Participants were myself, theannalog, calvin, vinay, and neil.
The whole thing started when theannalog asked about what it is, exactly, that guilds will allow us to do. "so like if we had a guild for just 'news discussion'? And that guild has certain rules/principles? That way, for instance, myspacers can have their own guild..."
So it becomes a question of how guilds can be divided up - what can a guild be based around? MySpace is a good example, there was talk of a music guild, a science guild, etc - so these are content-based guild solutions. But theannalog raised an interesting point by asking about a guild for news discussion, organized around certain principles. For those of you who have not yet read her famous post, 3 friendly suggestions for commenting on my column, please do. Basically, the idea came up that a guild can be devoted towards principles like this - not content, in this case, but rather on the preservation of an elevated discourse.
This led to another interesting idea: let's say anna starts a guild devoted to her three suggestions. The only way to get a high ranking within that guild, presumably, is going to be to post reasonable, thought out and civil comments. Over time, her guild will become known as a place where you can go talk about politics without being shouted down by people who are more interested in their own narrow viewpoint. It becomes a point of pride, then, to get a high ranking within her guild - if a guild is esteemed for maintaining productive discourse, and you are esteemed within that guild, then that's a badge of honor for you - you are going to have street cred when it comes to making reasonable posts. The same goes for, say, a science guild - if you get a high ranking in my theoretical guild "VineSci", you are going to have street cred as someone who is to be listened to where science is concerned.
Calvin also had the idea (and, for those of you who don't know, Calvin is a developer, so when he talks we all listen) that guilds have the ability to suspend/change the Code of Honor within the guild - "For instance, if you wanted to have a guild of real estate agents, they could choose to allow self-promotion." How interesting! This really opens up the idea of Newsvine as a medium rather than a publication - an important notion, in my opinion.
We also tossed around the idea of changing the metaphor - rather than seeing guilds as user groups, perhaps it makes more sense to look at them as pieces of geography within newsvine. Places, not people. The reason for that is that you can go to different guilds depending on what you are looking for, just like you can go to different stores depending on what you want to buy. Each place provides a set of tools - and Calvin was talking about possibly instituting custom toolkits for specialized guilds. For example, we could possibly include a photo slide-show for art guilds, etc.
We talked about the tiered degrees of membership - everyone can use the guild's filter to look at vine content, but only certain users can comment to the guild, only even higher ranked users can post in the guilds name, etc. This led to a discussion of guild identification - perhaps each guild leader gets to design a guild badge, and you get a little chart of what guilds you are in and what your ranking is within each guild. These badges could then go next to your posts and comments - or perhaps, since you have an unlimited number of guilds to join, perhaps you get to choose which badge you display based on what comment you make. No need to show your politics badge in a cooking discussion, or whatever.
And we left it at that. This post is also a comment in this thread.
