Senate Disscussion

yeah, Talen --I just typed my above proposal to the constitution so I could watch my keyboard make pretty letters appear on my monitor.

I know a no confidence vote was suggested....I think if there ever was to be a reason to dissovle the senate that the citizens should have that say....not an easy question to answer.

Cool.....but seriously Kendra I understand the concern of too many people...I also understand the concern of griefing but I think that there are unfounded fears. There is a lot of curiosity about us now and that could be a good thing. BY hand picking or choosing people to be a part of this project we are saying we don't have confidence in what we are doing.

who gets picked? how do we make sure that this allotment of people are fairly picked?
what if all the SDF group members want in...do you let them all in or because you want to be fair deny them based soley on their party affiliation? How do we get a diverse cross section of the SL populace?

By the way your letters are pretty but the p's are especially cute

Well I'm no expert either LOL

It depends a lot on each country, really. When you have an elected or hereditary Head of State, it is usual to give them a few powers of control as well. Since they are expected to be "above the political system", one of the powers they have is dissolution of the legislature assembly under the pretext that "it best serves the purpose of the citizens" (a rather broad and vague view), and calling for new elections. Again, this was one of the problems with the Weimar Republik in Germany, too many legislature dissolutions bring chaos to young democracies, since you need a certain degree of stability to make it work (btw, this was not the only bad example in recent history ).

When the Head of State is "nominated" rather than elected, it's just a figurehead with no real power (except as an advisor), and in this case, people don't "feel" that the Head of State is representing the Will of the People, so they don't allow the Head of State any dissoluting powers. This is exactly the case with Neualtenburg - we don't have formally a "Head of State", just a nominated Burgermeister. It doesn't feel right to give him/her the powers of dissolution.

The only "idea" I could have is giving it as a joint power to both Guild and Academy. They would have to agree to dissolve the assembly together - neither could do it separately.

This is a good point. Someone who carefully controls the influx of people can affect the makeup of the Representative body. Given that this only affects the democratically elected Representative branch, perhaps that branch should be excluded from admitting new citizens altogether. It seems to me that since individuals will have to be familiarized with the constitution and laws anyway, and the Philosophic branch is sworn to uphold the constitution in an unbiased manner, that the Philosophic branch might be the one to do it.

~Ulrika~

Provided it was done with a 2/3 vote in each branch during a time of crisis, this sounds very reasonable to me.

~Ulrika~

Even if the Philisophical branch does this then we are left with how they are chosen. By accident the odds can be stacked for or against a party or parties. I could come to the table as a prospective citizen and say I don't have an opinion yet on any parties knowing full well that I already made a choice. It seems to me that there can be no criteria that would make acceptance as a citizen fair for any one.

If we had open enrollment I doubt we would see mass signups for election rigging or creating chaos....even of the naysayers this just isnt how they want to spend their time in SL.

I would be agreeable to this but there must be sound criteria to follow for the vote to take place.

I agree with all three of these statements when they are one whole.

I think the Gildemeister should have independant say-so without warning.


:::::duck::::::

not even touching that statement.

But if we lump them all together I agree......I do reserve the right to fling cows from my trebuchet at either or both houses because I can.

WOW… that was allot of reading to get caught up… hehe

I agree

I agree that this is a problem but RL governments have to deal with these parties too. Exclusion is rarely the answer.

Yes, that is the problem with it. Who is to say if a party is worthy or not. In a free society if the will of the people becomes to disband the government altogether then that is what should happen. It is a risk here but an unavoidable one if we are going to be a free society.

I'm starting to get worried that this branch of the government is going to be ruled by a single individual despite the fact that it should be a relatively flat collective. We've talked the RA to death, perhaps we should focus on the internals of the Guild and how its members will interact.

~Ulrika~

I mostly agree, but it doesn't take much time to sign up for an open group and participate in thier elections. I can see lots of people taking 15 minutes to do this when a friend asks (with an oh-so-convincing arguement).

In a perfect world we would all play the Nash equilibirium, but human nature will lead some towards the Prisoner's Dilemma.

I disagree with the Open enrollment, and think that the philisophical branch should decide on enrollment. We are treading the Tragedy of Commons. Lets not let people suck out dwell without giving back to the city (via productivity or friendly Bavarian spirit!).


I think for the Constitutions sake, we should just say that Neualtenburg is open to all, but you must meet requirements set by the Philisophical branch to become an actual citizen.

Ok… it seems like we have a few ideas out there but seem to be going round and round. There are 2 issues concerning voting. The first is how to vote for seats in the Senate, how many seats there will be and if there will be appointed seats by the factions too. The other is how a bill/law gets passed.

In the interest of making some decisions lets focus on the Senate makeup and vote, make a decision about it and then move on to the bill/law vote.

I still like my last proposal and will re-post it here. If you agree with it then say so, if not please post what you like below. Lets get a feel for what the majority likes.

Here is my proposal:



This looks like a nice compromise to me. The will of the people will be heard and every party gets representation.

Example:
Party A 30 members - 7 candidates
Party B 20 members - 4 candidates
Party C 8 members - 1 candidate
Party D 5 members - 1 candidate

If everyone only has 1 vote there is a better chance of Parties D & E getting additional seats due to concentrating its votes on just 1 candidate.

Party A runs a huge risk running 7 members because they have diluted their strength in numbers. Surely there will be a favorite person for party A, who may even get 50-70% of the votes from the party.

Larger parties will have to balance the number of candidates with their likely voters

Smaller parties may throw their vote together to assure at least 1 seat between them.

Give the leading vote getter the title "Chief of the Senate" and power to break ties. This assures that the larger parties lose power if they try to fool with the votes by spreading them out over all of their candidates. They will surely not win the Chief seat if they do that.

The Chief of the Senate will probably be more moderate than the party leader who is ineligible because his seat was not won because of votes.

We should give some thought to in the future requiring someone to be a citizen for one election cycle before being eligible to run for the Senate. This will cut down on the people who are not really serious about helping. Also there might need to be some kind of agreement of requirements drawn up for citizenship.

you do know that was a joke right?

in all seriousness, however, I agree Let's hash this out over in Das Gildehaus thread.

I still support a Single Transferable Vote system (STV)

HAHA oh the rich gravy of irony.
Thank you Ulrika for making a dreary monday suddenly sunny.

Has Ace and the posts on the general forums been good publicity or what? Lol, Thanks Ace!

Yes! I know you're joking. It was just a good opportunity to suggest addressing the internals of the other branches. I also created a Philosophic branch thread as well so we can discuss the internals of that too.

~Ulrika~

I am having a lot of trouble understanding this. Could you explain it more simply for me? I know it's a bother but I want to make sure I completely grasp it before making a decision.

I do have a couple of comments on what I did understand though. I want to avoid having individuals run for seats outside of a faction. The reason is, that I don't want people voting for personalities, I want them voting for party positions. That way during a debate we don't waste time talking about who is "senate material" or having people's past posts examined in the general forums and their character called into question. I have been the subject of such cruel forum scrutiny in the past and it was horrible.

~Ulrika~

Maybe the example wasn’t the clearest… lol. Sorry about that.

I was attempting to convey that if all of the Open Seats were voted on as if it were one seat… I.E. one vote per citizen… that would lend to evening things out some.

Lets say party A has 50 members and 7 candidates for the open seats. Statistically there will be 1 person of the 7 that they like the best who might even get 50% of the vote. This dilutes the power of the party to elect the other 6 because they now only have 25 votes left. Another may get half of what is left… lets say 13… this now leaves 12 votes for the remaining 5 candidates.

A small party with 10 members and 1 candidate will concentrate all of their votes for their only candidate. Maybe through political alliances with smaller parties they negotiate a 5 member party to vote for their candidate. Now they have 15 votes concentrated on their one guy.

Anyway, I think the possibilities are intriguing but the basis of the proposal is this:


I am for allowing independants to run for Open Seats so we disagree on that point.

I understand now. That's fascinating.

I have to say that I prefer voting for factions as a group rather than voting for individuals within a faction for the reasons I posted previously. Additionally, we wouldn't be able to strut around saying we're using party-list proportional representation, specifically the Sainte-Laguë method of the highest average, to fill seats in the RA. I mean, that's just teh sexay.

If you'd like, we could schedule mock elections and try several methods of voting and discuss how we felt about the process and outcome. I'm also a whiz at analyzing systems and could look at the "voting outcome" space for each method and compare. It might take a few days though.

~Ulrika~

Seems to me we need to at a minimum narrow this down to say 2-3 choices and then focus our energies on refining them. I submitted my proposal. Even though it is redundant we need everyone to declare what method they like.

Then mock elections might be the next step to refine what we have.