I'd like to test the concept of guilds for indy game developpers. Probably there is nothing really original in it, it's all in the air since the open source and web community boost started. Still if anyone here supports the idea we could maybe make the world of indy game dev slightly better. Here is some kind of pre-constitutional text. A guild is a good word as it is nearly the same in english, french and probably other languages. A guild of coders, is a virtual and unformal association of independent game coders or small companies that share common interests and want to benefit actively from this association. The main goals behind the formation of the guilds should be to promote the talent and potential of indy game developpers or amateurs. Guilds should specially facilitate buisiness models linked to the new opportunities given by the www for the real video games workers, that is the coders and artists, game design included. Any guild does not target global domination not even in the field of indy game dev (lol). It is only based on ethics, fair rules and legality. Members will be included or excluded following the internal rules of each guild. But no real prosecution should ever be attempted between members concerning the issues of a guild. Thus a guild should only work with very limited budgets and not involve huge ammounts of money. However it has to be actually productive and not a simple replication of fantasist clubs. Several different guilds should exist, reflecting the diversity of indy game dev. Each guild should have any limited number of members. Say between 3 and 1000. The members of a guild share enough commonalities so that everyone profits more from the association than each members brings to it. a) A guild defines its own statutes. These statutes should be fair and regular but never be contested in front of any kind of tribunal. The statutes should not freeze initiatives, it should smooth internal relations and enhance cooperation and efficiency. b) Members share common ethics. - b1) Swear to respect other members and the statutes. - b2) Swear not to harm intentionnally, thieve anyone's ideas or goods. - b3) Swear to protect one of the fair members in distress or attacked as a member of the guild. - b4) Swear to give assistance to the rookies. c) Members share logical and practical means. - c1) Code bases in the form of full packages, libs, code samples, snippets. - c2) Available web facilities like server address, bandwitdh or space. d) Members discuss, establish and use common standards. - d1) Possibly share common graphics and models for different projects. - d2) Follow code rules so that b1) is more easilly done. - d3) Share knowledge pools. e) A guild is free to interact partially with other guilds and pre-existing entities like GameDev for instance. This applies specially to c) As everyone can see I have never been a lawyer. This will probably never change. I would appreciate any comment or correction. BTW this all started in the "Small Big Game For Real Coders" thread in the Help Wanted section.