Comments by RichHolmes:
Socialnomic I ran for a few months and was ended by consensus. There's talk of starting up Socialnomic II sometime.
The central idea of Socialnomic was to have no Administrator/Judge/Drudge/whatever, but to have game administration handled by any and all players. Any player could administer a rule change, update the game state, etc., according to procedures defined in the rules (and no player was required to!). Generally such administrative tasks earned a few points for the player who performed them.
In practice this worked fairly well. As I saw it, the chief problem was that in order to make it work, some overhead had to be added to the administrative tasks, and with only five players not all of whom in practice took on equal shares of administrative duty, administration was still a significant work load. This was compounded by what I saw as a needlessly complicated and redundant system in which four mailing lists were used, for voting, posting rules, other official actions, and discussion, respectively. Adopting a rule change resulting in one new rule, for example, required the administrating player to post three messages, one to each of three mailing lists.
GallivantingTripper says
I noticed that the SocialNomicRuleset posted here has gone some way to addressing RichHolmes's concerns - only 3 of the 4 mailing lists are actually used as all references to the RML (rules mailing list) have been replaced by the OAML (official action mailing list). The fundamental problem as I perceived it still remains - it is practically difficult to keep track of the current rule set without a moderator. Giving all players access to the entire rule set is obviously dangerous, with the chance of unintentional and intentional errors creeping in. But trying to assemble a ruleset out of two dozen or more discussion group threads is not - how you say - convenient. I recently raised the possibility of resurrecting Socialnomic on a Wiki - perhaps RichHolmes would like to discuss it here or maybe on WikiNomic?
RichHolmes replies
The SocialNomicRuleset posted here is, to the best of my understanding, the initial ruleset for Socialnomic I. It does appear to define four mailing lists but use only three. Presumably that was an oversight corrected early on... I don't know, I didn't join Socialnomic I until later.
As for Socialnomic II on a Wiki, perhaps you should take it up with Mr B?