I suppose this is another attempt to move the debate on from Demuth's previous entry (sorry Demuth). Basically, I think that some of us are struggling with fitting our countries into OGF, especially with new countries. Has the time has come to accept that OGF is not just a collaborative platform: it's a collaborative project? If that's the case, it means we need to work together.
How do we do that?
There are different ways. We could let it go on as it has been. That means people build individual countries and work out the framework those countries fit into afterwards.
The problem is, the more countries there are, the harder it is to do this. If two nearby countries have different ideas, its even harder. What if the country next door has a climate warmer than it 'should be' for the latitude; that will mean your country will have to be warmer too, or there is a 'verisimilitude problem'. So there has to be collaboration. Or you want to use English to map your country: there must be some connection with 'Ingerland' at some point in your country's history. Again there has to be collaboration.
In fact, there has to be a framework. Whether this framework is built after a country or before it still has to be there. This is an idea for how we develop a framework.
There is an order:
- Tectonics: work out where the continental plates are, where the mountain ranges are, how the plates have moves
- Climate: fix the climatic regions of the world, based on the distribution of mountains, ocean currents, weather systems
- Work out the distribution of biomes and evolutionary history, including the evolution of humans
- Work out the basics of human history, population expansion, major civilizations
- Develop the major historical religions
- Look at colonisation and imperialism
- Look at modern social and political issues
Much more...
As you read down the list you may see that more recent things require increasing degrees of collaboration and of communication, mainly because there are a lot of countries already. But it makes sense to work out the things at the top of the list first.
As we work through this framework, we can make decisions that become fixed - the OGF canon. We can leave some things open-ended, but some things do have to be closed. Even things that are fixed will always be able to be added to, in detail and depth.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we do need some 'community guidelines', because what we will be collaborating on will be, in some ways, controversial; different people will see it in different ways. That is not 'political correctness' it is just 'getting on with each other'.
For example:
- Criticism should be both given and received respectfully
- Global decisions involve the community
- The community decides whether a global decision becomes canon or not
- The community works to ensure that developments fit into it the canon and add to it
We all know that in the real world anyone who ends up finding OGF is in a good position, with access to a computer, to the internet, to some spare time. We are a very small minority of the people in the real world. But the OGF world doesn't need to be like the real world in terms of 'fairness'. We should all have a chance to contribute our ideas and creativity.
Do we start?