modpol: Modular Politics Prototype for Minetest

This is a mod for Minetest that enables diverse governance mechanisms. It seeks to implement the Modular Politics proposal. Ideally, in the future, it will be possible to use this framework to simulate governance in a number of platform contexts.

This mod produces an API that can serve as a dependency for other mods that add specific governance functionalities.

Currently modpol requires a Unix-style system. But it is intended to become more fully platform independent. Here, only the init.lua (and the optional storage-mod_storage.lua) files are Minetest-specific.

For background information and project roadmap, see the wiki.

Command line

To interact with the interpreter on Unix systems in CLI mode, install lua or luajit and execute the following command in this directory:

$ lua
> dofile("modpol.lua")

Minetest

To use this in Minetest, simply install it as a Minetest mod. Minetest will load init.lua. See the source code for information about chat commands which can then be used.

Most of these commands will later be buried under other commands that do more privilege checking. These are mainly for testing purposes.

/addorg [orgname] - Create a new org
/listorgs - Lists the orgs (and their members) currently in existence
/listplayers - Lists all the players currently in the game
/joinorg [orgname] - Adds the user to the specified org
/pollself [question] - Asks the player a yes/no/abstain question

Storage

By default, a data directory named "data" will be created in this directory. "/data" will contain a log file and serialized program data files.

Another storage method may be chosen in modpol.lua. A StorageRef-based method for Minetest 5.* is included: storage-mod_storage.lua.

Stand-alone Modular Politics

To separate the Modular Politics core from the Minetest mod, simply remove these files:

mod.conf
init.lua
description.txt
depends.txt
/storage/storage-mod_storage.lua
/modpol_minetest/

Eventually the stand-alone modpol package will be published as a separate repo.

Authorship

Initiated by Nathan Schneider of the Media Enterprise Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, as part of the Metagovernance Project. Based on the paper "Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities."

We'd love to have more contributors, particularly from the Minetest community! Please join the conversation in the Issues or the Minetest.net forum.

Thanks to contributors: Robert Kiraly OldCoder, MisterE (project refactoring, core feature development)

Licenses

Project: MIT-based Hippocratic License
Lua Serpent Serializer: MIT

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