Citizen Discussion - Adjust Quorum/Census Levels?

[Danke]

I am totally with donsig on this one. If you can't interest half the active citizenry in voting, why bother with the new law? If we used some other determination of a quorum (i.e. average of all polls for last 20 days; # of citizens posting in current term; fixed number = to 1/2 the number of individuals in gov't positions, etc) it is still going to be the same. boring/special interest laws will not amass the needed votes to pass. This is not a bad thing.

 

[Shaitan]

I agree that a poll should need to get half of the active citizenry in order to be valid. I do NOT agree that the returns from the Presidential election alone are an accurate way to measure the number of active citizens. Active citizens are the people generally active on the Forum and their number is FAR lower than 51. A much better gauge of the true number of active citizens is to take the average of the election polls.

 

[disorganizer]

Danke: we talked about averaging all elections for a term to build the quorum, not all polls ;-)

The presidential election attracts much more ppl than others, so the average of the election will also show the average interest in the game (in fact, the moving average of the polls of the last 20-30 days would fit best but is almost impossible to calculate for a normal being).

 

[donsig]

Originally posted by disorganizer
donsig: you also have to mention the circumstances under which the law passed
a) total agreement (well, almost)
b) massive campaigning by pm

especially on point b) i dont like this to happen again (but i really had to do it).

There's nothing wrong with this kind of lobbying disorganizer. And I still see nothing wrong with the simple measure of using the presidential election for the census. Aside from it's simplicity I really did hope that it would raise the quorum levels. I am a proponent of high quorum levels because I think rule making is a serious thing that should not be taken lightly. Bad rules are bad for the game. I see nothing wrong with making it difficult to make rules.

That said, I want to go back to a point I've been trying to make to a long time. We do not need a new rule every time we want to do something new or different. Parks could have been established by presidential proclamation. If the DP and governors decided to go along then we'd have parks with no problem. If someone refused to go along with the idean then (IMHO) we should have tried public pressure. If that failed then the time would come to get a law written and passed to force compliance. we seem to always want to jump straight to the rule making part without first trying the easier route.

 

[disorganizer]

Here goes the discussion again. But before we fill up this thread also, i stop ;-)
Just one thing: The idea of the laws was to make general rules (like "there will be areas where special buildings can not be constructed. they will be defined by citizen vote" as law and the details "national parks: no polluting buildings, no RR, ... override rules etc" in the standards) and thats what my original proposal was requested as. Just adding it completely in the laws made the thing faster to implement.
The problem we have now is that we noticed major flaws in some rules, and that it shouldnt be impossible to change rules.

I am, nevertheless, pro another proposal:
why dont we just throw away the laws and standards. Lets to a plain basic constitution as ruleset for the general ideas of the game. Then, we set up a book of regulations with all other things in there which define the constitution.
The regulations could be easily changed by simple citizen poll over 2 days with normal mayority, the ruleset is almost impossible to change, taking 2/3 of the president election participation(!) approval and a 2/3 cabinet and a 2/3 senate approval.
example: departments. they need not be declared in the constitution. the cons may only state that the 3 governmental powers of judicacy, executive and legislative need to be seperated. the regulations define the departments we use.
example: playout
the cons only states that a chat is used for playout and that a designated player does it openly according the will of citizenry. all other things (polls,rules,announcment rules etc.) are defined in the regulations

(i know i proposed this before and was tared and feathered for it ;-)

 

[Shaitan]

The only argument against adjusting quorums is that we want it to be difficult to pass or change laws. What people are failing to realize is that quorums are not a valid way to do this. Adjusting the approval rating required to change or create a law is the way to do that.

Quorums affect ALL polls, not just the ones about laws. You want to get a deputy appointment confirmed? You need a quorum. Want to get a city name changed for your ethnic group? You need a quorum. Want to get an ally, declare war, declare peace, sell a tech, do ANYTHING through a poll? ALL polls must reach the quorum level to be valid.

Artificially high quorums take away polling as a realistic option for decision making. It is difficult to impossible to reach such a high quorum in a timely manner. It is most definitely impossible to reach it for items that do not have a very wide base of interest. Right now Grandmaster is trying to get Salamanca changed to Friedenburg (City of Peace, in German) to honor the German ethnic group and Phoenatica's history of striving for peace. Although there is an enormous ratio of support for the change there are simply not enough people interested in the subject to reach our incredibly high quorum. Our current quorum level is stifling this game play initiative.

We need to get a solid and consistent census so we can have a solid and consistent quorum. If the desire is to make lawmaking difficult then we can change the approval ratio required for making laws or create a separate quorum level for lawmaking.

 

[Cyc]

Quoting Shaitan:
Artificially high quorums take away polling as a realistic option for decision making.

That's it in a nutshell, people. We have made it so that an unusually high Presidential Election poll brings the game to a slow crawl. This is a bad thing. Polls are the life breath of the game. Why hinder their use in decision making by making it too difficult to validate a poll? As Shaitan said, the approval ratio for changing Laws can be changed. I don't think having two different quorum levels is a good thing though.

 

[donsig]

Originally posted by Cyc
Quoting Shaitan:
Artificially high quorums take away polling as a realistic option for decision making.

That's it in a nutshell, people. We have made it so that an unusually high Presidential Election poll brings the game to a slow crawl. This is a bad thing. Polls are the life breath of the game. Why hinder their use in decision making by making it too difficult to validate a poll? As Shaitan said, the approval ratio for changing Laws can be changed. I don't think having two different quorum levels is a good thing though.

Well, who tied law making quorums to everything else? If you all would accept local issues for what they are we wouldn't need a national vote on everything. The people who live in the city should be able to name the city. But we have a rule about it so we must follow the rules. If you all want to get down to brass tacks I think we need to make laws difficult to pass. Maybe more so than normal because we have such a tendency to want to make laws and rules. Time and again we've passed laws only to find they are inadequate or downright bad. The whole reason I vetoed that amendment back in term three was to try to get us to slow down on rule making. As I've said before, we don't need a rule every time we want to do something.

 

[disorganizer]

Take for an example the park-system...
governors rights are in the laws (or even in the constitution?), so to bring down a part of their rights it had to be a law...
if we would do it the other way around, everything has to be a standard by default, but hey: the standards can only be changed by executive, and so the citizens have exactly no say about it. the sense of the game is that the citizens rule it, not the executives. so if we would change the standard to be changed by simple citizen vote instread of executive vote and bring all laws we have now to be a standard, maybe this would fit best. if we then apply the quorum only for laws and maybe a different level for standards, it would propably be ok (for example 1/2 for laws and 1/3 for standards).

 

[donsig]

The problem lies in our split of the constitution. We ended up with a rule making system of three tiers rather than a differentiation of rules into three different types as I envisioned. I saw a need for the leaders (especially the DP) to be able to make certain rules regarding the running of their departments on their own without input (read interference) from anyone else. Scheduling the turn chat is the prime example. Let the president schedule it as he or she sees fit. If there is a problem with scheduling it then bring it up to the president in the forums and try to resolve it that way. If the president is being unreasonable or obstinate then make a rule to force the president's hand. Citizens could certainly give input to the president on when the turn chat's should be, how much advance notice there should be, etc.

We actually had that problem back in term one and we ended up changing the constitution fairly quickly to require a 24 hour notice of turn chats. This rule resulted in a few turn chats being postponed because Grey Fox couldn't (or didn't) always give proper notice. We soon realized we didn't like the rule we had made and had to go back and make a new one.

We repeated this mess last term by passing the MIA leader law. As we can now see that law does not alleviate the problem it was meant to solve - we still have build queues that are not done!

Finally, as to the park law. I still say the law was not necessary. Parks (either national, provincial or local) could have been established with the cooperation of the appropriate officials. Yes, it is true that governors have certain rights regarding tile usage in their provinces. However, if the governor agrees to the park proposal then we have a park with no constitutional or legal hassles. If the governor does not agree then public opinion may sway him or her since they are supposed to be doing what the people want anyway! If a governor ignores public opinion then (and only then) is it time to talk about passing a law to force the governor's hand in the issue.

 

[Shaitan]

Originally posted by donsig
Well, who tied law making quorums to everything else? If you all would accept local issues for what they are we wouldn't need a national vote on everything. The people who live in the city should be able to name the city. But we have a rule about it so we must follow the rules. If you all want to get down to brass tacks I think we need to make laws difficult to pass. Maybe more so than normal because we have such a tendency to want to make laws and rules. Time and again we've passed laws only to find they are inadequate or downright bad. The whole reason I vetoed that amendment back in term three was to try to get us to slow down on rule making. As I've said before, we don't need a rule every time we want to do something.

There's no tie of law making quorums here. There is no law making quroum. The quorum is the quorum. Quorum simply means "the number of people we require in order to make a decision". I argued for a lower quorum and higher approval ratio for laws when we were working on these. I proved that my method worked with the math of the (then) current elections and previous elections. I showed that the average of the elections gave a fairly steady number that we could base everything off of. I was defeated. I'm bringing it back up again because I have been proven correct. A high quorum is not the correct way to make laws hard to pass.

We really can't use local government. We do not have the population to make that work. What you will end up with is one person in each city so they can rename it and do whatever else they want there. (That's an exageration, of course. We don't have enough active citizens to put a person in each city.)

As far as making laws hard to pass, I'm all for it. I'm also all against it. I can work with either system and be perfectly happy either way. The point here is that the current way we figure the census (and therefor the quorum) is wrong and must be changed. If we want to make sure it is still very difficult to pass laws, increase the approval ratio required for a law to pass.

 

[Cyc]

Cyc shakes his head and walks away....

 

[donsig]

Originally posted by Shaitan

There's no tie of law making quorums here. There is no law making quroum. The quorum is the quorum. Quorum simply means "the number of people we require in order to make a decision"...

We really can't use local government. We do not have the population to make that work. What you will end up with is one person in each city so they can rename it and do whatever else they want there. (That's an exageration, of course. We don't have enough active citizens to put a person in each city.)

One quorum would work fine if we were only trying to make one type of decision. Face it, we either need one quorum with several different approval rates or several different quorums that use the same approval rate. Us non-math people say, "what's the difference?" The point is we're trying to make different kinds of decisions and we need different mechanisms for reaching them.

As for local government not working, I say lets try it before we pronounce it unworkable. In this demo game there was very little reason to move to a city because it made no difference where you lived! With a few exceptions only those who named a city really had reason to look after the city. Perhaps if we gave the cities a little power and self-government we'd have people moving around and perhaps we'd have a richer and more interesting democracy game.

 

[Shaitan]

Proposal: Change the method of determining the census from a direct read of the Presidential election to an average of all voted elections.

Reason: The Presidential election is not an accurate read of the participants in the Forum. Census figures based on this single source can be outrageously high (Term 5) or low (Term 4). An average of all elections which have votes (unopposed elections do not have votes) gives a far more reliable reading of the actual active populace.

Caveat: For a term such as #5 where the Presidential election participation is far greater than the average election participation, this change will make it easier to qualify a poll to change a law. Recommended action to retain the speedbump in the legislative process is to change the approval ratio required for a law to be changed/added from 2/3 to 3/4.

Anti-Caveat: No matter what, this game is supposed to be about the will of the people. 2/3 is already a supermajority. If this high a ratio of people want new laws then they should get their new laws.


I will put up a poll proposal tomorrow.

 

[Cyc]

I'm back. I second this proposal.

 

[Bill_in_PDX]

Originally posted by donsig
Finally, as to the park law. I still say the law was not necessary. Parks (either national, provincial or local) could have been established with the cooperation of the appropriate officials. Yes, it is true that governors have certain rights regarding tile usage in their provinces. However, if the governor agrees to the park proposal then we have a park with no constitutional or legal hassles. If the governor does not agree then public opinion may sway him or her since they are supposed to be doing what the people want anyway! If a governor ignores public opinion then (and only then) is it time to talk about passing a law to force the governor's hand in the issue.

I fully agree with your statement here, and give you extra gold stars for extensive use of italicized emphasis.

My observation on this issue overall is that there seems to be a lot of sentiment for breaking down, or throwing away, laws and standards whenever they are seen to be in the way of something some citizen wants. That feeling reverses itself though when a citizens feels strongly about an issue, as that's when they want it fully protected by extensive laws.

These laws are then seen by others as further uneccessary complications, etc.. and the cycle begins again.

In this process I think we have been remarkably successful in simulating real life democracy.

As for the CoL and CoS. I would recommend not chucking them. Modify and improve, sure, but throwing them out, just to pass other laws as suggested earlier in this thread really accomplishes nothing.

I am not opposed to changing the quorum rules, but I am not sure it is really a problem. I also believe that the DP should be given wide lattitude in circumstances where there is not predetermined instruction. We elect a president to lead us, why not let them. It should be a job with responsibility and the risk of taking heat. donsig set a great example of how to handle that pressure appropriately.

 

[Shaitan]

The DP does have very wide latitude to make decisions when there are no posted instructions. In fact, the DP has universal latitude as the sole source of authority in such instances. That power has simply been avoided.

 

[Bill_in_PDX]

Originally posted by Shaitan
The DP does have very wide latitude to make decisions when there are no posted instructions. In fact, the DP has universal latitude as the sole source of authority in such instances. That power has simply been avoided.

On this point, I do agree with you.

I am guessing though that discomfort with some of our laws could be a contributor here. Further, after term 3, there is a definate shyness about indavertantly conflicting with the "will of the people".

Put me in the camp of those who believe that silence is agreement. I don't subscribe to the theory that any citizen here speaks for the majority of the people, no matter what they themselves may think.

 

[donsig]

Originally posted by Shaitan
The DP does have very wide latitude to make decisions when there are no posted instructions. In fact, the DP has universal latitude as the sole source of authority in such instances. That power has simply been avoided.

It has been avoided because of the the rules wrangling we've done. Even I became wary of using that latitute after a couple investigations. The DP is also in a tough spot because there may well be citizens voicing opinions on a given matter but a leader may neglect to post instructions. Like any leader the DP should be following the will of the people.

BTW, I'm opposed to the official proposal offered by Shaitan.

 

[donsig]

Originally posted by Bill_in_PDX

I fully agree with your statement here, and give you extra gold stars for extensive use of italicized emphasis.

Extra gold stars! And I thought I was getting carried away.