The Future... spin-off: Intellectual Property and resource sharing

[Epistolary Richard]

I wonder if there would be any benefit in having a forum for modders who are members of projects?

Such a forum would be relatively simple to set-up, but it would mean that mod leaders would have to send a request to admin to add new members to the user group that would access it.

But I wonder to what extent modders would be willing to discuss things with members of other mod teams that they wouldn't be willing to discuss with the wider community? Presumably if they don't want to discuss a matter within the community in the first place, then it is because it is something they want to develop within their own mod. One would imagine that members of fellow mod-teams would be far more able to understand and implement such an idea rather than other members of the community.

Perhaps two venues of "modding questions" are needed? Or maybe a forum for mod management staff? There are advantages and disadvantages both ways I suppose but I think it would aid in the sharing of IP at least.

The principal disadvantage to my mind would be a great 'brain drain' from the regular modding forums. How do new modders learn? From reading the words of people who are more experienced - if those members with experience are all somewhere else in a hidden forum then it really would be the case that the regular modding areas would just have beginner questions asked on it.

We need to have a better way of expressing how we want modders work used, and whether they would be willing for it to be used after they retire.

I agree.

Or there could be a forum term stating something like "In uploading my work I understand that, should I retire from the community or become otherwise uncontactable for a period of one month or more, that any file uploaded will pass into the public domain unless I specify otherwise in the upload notes...blah blah blah"

Have a look at www.creativecommons.org - I found it quite interesting.

The question would be what would qualify one for entrance, and if being a member of a hosted mod alone (TWC, Guild, SCC etc.) then what would the qualifications be for the recognition of a project in the first place and how would all the forums agree on it?

These are all good questions.

and share the little stuff that nobody will start writing tutorials about?

I do wonder why people aren't writing tutorials about such stuff. Tutorials don't have to be all mega-all inclusive. There are many smaller guides about.