RA Scalability

I am concerned that the current method of proposing, voting, and communicating the results of bills in the RA is not scalable. Even with our relatively small group, there is a lot of overhead associated with writing bills, transferring them to note cards, holding the meeting, and then posting the results.

Would an online system facilitate the RA proceedings? For instance, the website could have a list of bills that one could vote on. If it passed, the bill would be moved to the law queue with the record of who voted how. This would eliminate the need to transfer bills to note cards, to summarize the voting results, and to add the law to the law wiki. The only thing that would have to be posted is the transcript. The down side is that one would have to have SL running in a window with a browser open too (until we could put web pages on a prim).

What thoughts and concerns do you have?

~Ulrika~

yes --an online web-based vote system would be fantastic -- I'd actually like one for the Guild, and would be willing to commision you to implement this.

Also --I'd like the SC to write up a constitutional interpretation of Guild vs. RA responsabilities. Currently many of the RA meetings seem to revolve around this issue, and I think the SC needs to clarify this.

I think we shouldn't eliminate the "holding a meeting" part. It is a really effective way to debate the minority view. Real-time, av-to-av debate, is better and more real, than the carefully planned pen of the forums.

edit: after re-reading... I don't think you are suggesting that.

Online voting does raise some security concerns just like it does in RL. I would hope that you would require authentication and encrypt the traffic. It may seem like overkill for this application but I wouldn't be surprised if someday, someone tried to fraudulently affect the results.

The proposal also makes me question the potential impact on the local government itself. If voting is made to be 'scalable', wouldn't that preclude the need for a representative assembly at all? Why not let all citizens vote on all bills? I had read in the transcript from the recent civics class that the impetus for the RA was because it wasn't possible to get all citizens together in the sim at the same time for a meeting and vote. If voting was online and scalable that argument would no longer hold would it?

I realize that's an oversimplification of the RA's role, and I don't oppose the idea of online voting-- I think it's a good suggestion. But it has got me thinking.

There are many reasons why we don't use direct democracy in the city. The most important reason is that direct democracy is by definition the rule of the majority, which means that all minority voices are guaranteed not to be represented. This is actually how SL groups work and is something we set out to solve. We do this by allocating seats on the RA using the Sainte-Laguë method, which gives minorities a greater voice.

Other problems with direct democracy include continuous voting on issues by citizens who most likely won't have the time to educate themselves on issues and the difficulty of holding large in-world meetings.

~Ulrika~

That makes sense. Thanks for educating me.

No problem. As a member of the SC, interpreting the constitution and knowing the laws is my job.

~Ulrika~

Do any other current members of the RA have an opinion on this? I'm looking for things that could be logically transitioned to the website.

~Ulrika~

I think this is a great idea. Like the bank, I don't think it really changes much, but automating simple tasks when your society is based in a digital world seems like a no-brainer to me. Especially since SLozilla is right around the corner.

What's SLozilla?

~Ulrika~

I think that Satchmo's referring to HTML-on-Prim. That feature would use an integrated version of Firefox.