Meeting of the Representative Assembly

The next meeting of the Representative Assembly (RA) will be this Sunday, December 11 at 1:00 PM GameTime (Pacific Standard Time). It will be held as usual in the Rathaus on the MarketPlatz.

Since some of the members cannot attend, the agenda will be reduced to just those urgent issues which must be dealt with now. These are promotion for the Winter Festival at Neualtenburg, and the decisions needed in order to carry out the elections scheduled to begin January 15.

If there are other urgent issues which must be decided before the end of the year, please post notice of them here, so that we can try to add them to the agenda.

We apologize for the limited nature of the December agenda. We are confident that all RA members will be available again for business after January 1, at which time we will resume the full agenda of matters before the RA.

Please know that all citizens of Neualtenburg are welcome, even urged, to attend. Non-citizens are also welcome to observe but not participate.


Sudane

Just some thoughts on what we're planning to discuss, for you to get ready with your questions and suggestions.

1. Winter Festival

As you know, this has been planned almost before summer — we Neualtenburgers are long-time planners (in terms of SL time ). Besides turning the textures back to snow, building an ice ring at the usual "event location" (Wiesn), and some ideas for events (like building contests and eventually integrating the Award Cerimony in the Winter Festival), we need not only a slightly longer list of attractive events, but also ways to promote them.

Fortunately, this year, it looks like we can even do some budgeting for advertising & promotion.

One issue that I have raised is the "overlap" with Linden Lab's own Winter Festival. After talking to the Lindens about it, it's now quite clear that there will be no "overlapping" or "competition" — we can (and are encouraged to do so) integrate our own events into the overall Linden Winter Festival. There is no need for us to do it on the "official sims". Actually, this time, they are encoraging activities to be spread around the grid. The advantage for us: free promotion! Disadvantage: Linden Lab tend to do everything on an incredible short time and their festival will start on the 12th, so we should definitely get them a schedule of events just after our RA meeting — at the latest!

2. Elections

We have set up the date for the next term to start on January, 15th, but it's also time to do a bit more homework.

Traditionally, campaigning should officially start two weeks before that, the time when all parties should have presented their lists for election (since it takes a bit of time to set up the voting booth system). This means that all parties wishing to present themselves to elections should start their own group just for that purpose and be ready by January, 1st (I know it's a bad day!). Parties must have at least 5 citizens as members, even if they are not all elegible because some members are serving on the other two branches. We found out that both the SDF and the MPP fortunately have enough members to present themselves at the elections, which is good news.

However, since the election procedure is often complex and not so easily understood, I think we should host a few "Civic Classes" (ie. small, informal gatherings where citizens — and obviously non-citizens as well — get to understand the complexities of Neualtenburg's government thingies, and are able to hold Q&A sessions). I don't need to remind you how outstandingly good Aliasi Stonebender's past classes have been (just on the recruiting side, we always get a few new citizens when she holds one of those classes ). If we can manage to hold one of those every week until at least January, 1st, I hope that we can make all citizens understand how the voting procedures work, and even encourage them to either join an existing party or, even bettter, create new ones (we need diversity!).

Like Sudane said, we have several other things to discuss at the RA level, but unfortunately our time is limited due to the holidays (it's getting hard to get even just the 5 members of the RA together for an hour or two every week!), so we'll concentrate on those two pressing issues, and postpone the rest of the issues very likely for the next term (like Ulrika's proposed Constitutional revisions, finally setting up the Bonds system, and preparing the 2006 budget, once and for all, as well as doing some planning ahead in terms of major events — we almost managed to plan 6 months of activities, so we should get bolder and plan a whole year in advance ).

I hope to see most of you on Sunday for input and feedback

I'm done with my exams for this semester, so I've penciled in around 3-4 PM SL Time for Saturday to offer a class. I can hold it on my own land, which is conviently near the Weisen to offer an ice-skating session afterwards.