There has been some speculation lately that maybe the distinction used to term a House a Major House or a Minor House could be set as simply as having Minor Houses not actually own any "shares" of GHC (General Hosting Corp aka Galactic Holding Corp) at all, so they would not actually really own whatever Civilisation(s) they run either, actual ownership being what distinguishes a House as a Major House.
Some system would be used to allow Major Houses to delegate (proxy) the votes of some number of their "shares" to a subsidiary or related House that would get the benefit of the votes, and the ability to potentially run one or more of the Major House's Civilisations, but all either at the whim of the Major House or possibly via some internal to the Major House government type by which a given Major House settles which families / Houses within it get to exercise which of the powers of the Major House, for how long, under what restrictions and so on and so on and so on.
Recall that under CoffeeMUD quite a few "government types" as it were are available to players in the form of the various types of clan or guild type organisation CoffeeMUD provides.
It should not be hard to use CoffeeMUD for group decisions; even without lobbying for any actual changes or additions to off the shelf CoffeeMUD one could for example use some existing thing group members get to vote on to decide any issue, like candidate A proposes this, candidate B proposes that, vote whicher of those candidates into a certain position to pass their motion; or candidate A suggests making such and such a room the whatever-room we get to vote on, candidate B proposes the other room, vote for whichever to support that candidate.
Though likely it also would not be terribly hard to lobby for off the shelf CoffeeMUD to add a generic proposals voting to its repertoire, just an arbitrary text-string to vote on without the result of the vote engaging any in game consequence such as officer assignemt or room assignment.
-MarkM-
