Questions on Factions/Parties

I have some questions about Factions/Parties. Some of these are questions that others have also asked me and I have not been able to answer. So I wanted to present all the questions here in one thread to see if I can get them clarified. Some questions have similar answers to other questions, but I tried to break them down to the most simple form.

1. What role do the Factions/Parties play in the Neualtenburg Government?

2. What are the reasons for joining or forming a Faction/Party?

3. Is joining/starting a Faction/Party a requirement in order to be able to take part in the government or voting process or other aspects of the city?

4. What are the disadvantages to not belonging to a Faction/Party?

5. What disadvantages are there to belonging to a Faction/Party?

6. Are there any restrictions on Faction/Party recruitments?

7. What is the current minimum number of people needed to form a "legit" party? (should be detailed in our Constitution I believe)

8. How is "leadership" and/or "roles" within each Faction/Party determined? Is this something each Faction/Party decides for itself?

9. Is there a way to get a "sticky" moderated list of all current Factions/Parties so that we have a place to send people to read about them? Are there plans to make sections on the website for individual Faction/Party information? Could we make use of Cristiano's "Group" forums for questions and answers to individual Factions/Parties?


These are the questions I have thus far (again from myself and a few others). If anyone else has questions to add please do! And for those who can provide answers, this would help some of greatly! I know for me this is the part of our government that confuses me the most, mainly due to needing clarification on the questions above. Thank you!

I'll try and answer to the best of my abilities (Although, I could be wrong on any of these):
1) Hold seats in the senate
2) ...to get a seat in the senate?
3) Nope
4) Can't be in the senate
5) Can't be a meister or SC member
6) I... don't think so.
7) 1/2 the number of senate seats
STV
9) Ask Ulrika

1) to 4), ok!

5) No, as I understand it, you can be both a party member and either a Meister or SC member. You just can't be elected/nominated for an official position in the Rep. Assembly!

- Members of the party/faction group have to be citizens
- They can only belong to one party/faction at the same time (but you can certainly change parties by leaving one group and entering another! - Q: what if this happens while you hold a seat in the RA? Hehe)

7) is ok. is currently under serious discussion (will be the biggest change in the Constitution as currently proposed!)

... and I really have several things to propose as well. I'll start another thread on that... later!

Basically, I just need to know if:
a) Ulrika is willing to have us use more of her web space
b) If her access includes nifty things like database access (and under which technology)
c) If not, if someone has shared space available with PHP + MySQL (I do, I do ... and quite willing to let Neualtenburg "use" it)
d) A detailed description of what we need... this should really go into another thread. If I got some time, I'll do it tomorrow

So do I, through the lovely people I work with: unlimited SQL databases, email accounts, etc etc. I'd let the Projekt have as many as they wanted.

One question that was raised at the Project meeting was that none of the registed parties had enough members to meet the requirement to be able to fill half the senate. Has that issue been resolved?

OK! I have answers for all the faction questions. I couldn't sleep last night so I looked into how things are done in real life. I'll add a post and the information to the constitution tonight and we can discuss it.

~Ulrika~

In order to hold a seat in the representative assembly, one must be a member of a faction. Factions exist to unify people with common ideologies and provide a layer of abstraction to focus debates on platforms rather than on individuals.

One is not required to join a faction and may vote for factions as an independent. Factions which receive more votes, hold more seats in the representative assembly.

Reasons one would join a faction:

1. To show support for a group which shares your ideology.
   
2. To run for a seat in the representative assembly through a faction.
   
3. To serve the city by charting its future through a faction.

Reasons one would form a faction:

1. To promote an ideology in the city.
   
2. To address perceived deficiencies in existing factions.
   

All citizens will be able to vote whether they are in a a faction or not, however one must be a member of a faction to hold a seat in the representative assembly.

There is no disadvantage either way. It's similar to RL where one may be as engaged in politics as much or as little as they would like.

A person may belong to only one faction at a time.

A faction can consist of a single person, however in order to run for seats in the representative assembly it must meet minimum size requirements. The minimum size for a seat-seeking faction is one half of the representative assembly (the RA is seven or 10% of the population, whichever is greater). So for the first election, the minimum size will be four.

Members of a faction are ranked internally by secret ballot during elections. Those with the highest rank will occupy seats in the RA. However, factions may organize in any way they see fit outside of the RA to facilitate their agenda.

That's a great question. The social democratic faction (SDF) curently has its platform in world (at my home in Seefeld and in my SDF buttons), on my web page, and in the group forums. To simplify things, we should create an in-world synopsis of all our factions with links to a wiki with all our government and faction information. The goal should be to equalize the technology so that we're spending time on the platform instead of on flashy webpages.

~Ulrika~