Constitution Discussion : Article J

[Rik Meleet]

Here is a starting point for Article J -- discussion?

Article J.  Elected officials must plan and act according to the will 
            of the people.

 

[Cyc]

We need a blurb here defining the Will of the People, such as:

Article J.  Elected officials must plan and act according to the will 
            of the people. The will of the people will be determined 
            through discussion and polls. If discussion is done in a 
            chat room or outside the normal of the DG forums, then it 
            must be documented prior to the Turn Chat.

Anyway, we need to address the WOTP somehow.

 

[Cyc]

Nothing to see here, move along.

 

[Immortal]

As long as prior to the turn chat doesnt mean an hour before, cycs blurb is a good addition to an already nice rule.

 

[Epimethius]

I third Cyc's addition.

 

[DaveShack]

I prefer the one that Rik posted. We don't need to define how the will of the people is determined.

 

[gert-janl]

We do need to define how the will of the people is determined. We had some debates about this in DG4, and if we don't define that now, it'll certainly come back to the judiciary later in our game. Then the whole Judicial Review overload of DG4 looms again.

 

[Immortal]

Proposal Article J:

Article J.  Elected officials must plan and act according to the will 
            of the people. The will of the people will be determined 
            through discussion and polls, formal or informal. If discussion is
            done outside the the DG forums, then it must be documented before 
            the turn chat in a timely manner.

 

[Donovan Zoi]

If we are going with a bare bones ruleset then, uh, more is more.

I agree with Cyc's proposal as written.

 

[Immortal]

Cycs was good, but the timely manner I thought was very important to specify, there must be some time between the start of the chat and these backdoor discussions, should they become significant.

 

[Donovan Zoi]

My bad, I just assumed they were the same. You may get some resistance due to the formal/informal clause, but perhaps not. I always treated informal polls as gospel, but do we want that in our Constitution?

And to prevent trouble, I believe that "timely manner" needs to be strictly defined. One man's 24 hours notice is another's 3 minutes before (or after) the turnchat starts. We need to rein these both in.

Perhaps 2 hours before the turnchat begins? How do we tweak this further?

Article J.  Elected officials must plan and act according to the will 
            of the people. The will of the people will be determined 
            through discussion and polls, formal or informal. If discussion is
            done outside scope of the DG forums, then it must be documented 
            2 hours prior to the commencement of the turnchat.

 

[Immortal]

I agree with that proposal and have copied it to my now v0.35 constitution word document.

 

[Falcon02]

I agree with Immortal's version

 

[Noldodan]

Perhaps 2 hours before the turnchat begins? How do we tweak this further?

Whoah, whoah! Hold on there! Why do we need 2 hours? I can see that being okay if we do an offline preturn, but we only need that in late game. As long as the instructions are posted before the announcement that the turnchat has actually begun, they should be legal.

 

[Cyc]

Well, I can see Immortals point, I wouldn't want people getting into a chat room 5 minutes prior to a T/C and determining the WOTP. That wouldn't be right or good for the citizens. But "in a timely manner", although understood by myself and many others can be seen as too vague by many more. I'll leave it up to you guys.

 

[Immortal]

Nol: my reasoning behind putting such a clause in is that there may be objections to this on basis of chain of command, or intergovernmental relations.

If for instance an agreed upon build queue in wartime called for a switch to spearmen, however it is decided to maintain the 2 turns still left on the temple. The military advisor CAN overrule this matter.

This creates a sticky situation and a potential PI.

 

[DaveShack]

WOTP as determined via PM or private chat is problematic because it assumes that enough people will see it that dissenting opinions will be given a chance. I would expect sufficient advance notice of the non-forum based event (24 hours notice?) in order to ensure that everyone who wants to weigh in on an item are given a chance to say their piece. Alternatively allow some form of proxy votes, where citizens who cannot attend the semi-private function can instruct others who will be there how to vote, and a framework to make that vote count.

Note this is quite different than deciding how to proceed during the chat when there are no instructions on a matter, or if WOTP cannot be determined on a matter.

 

[Falcon02]

I'd have to say 2 hours isn't enough. The point "if I'm not mistaken" is to give the citizenry to view the documentation and discussion which was done outside the t/c and give their view and any objections before the t/c. So a person can't claim a discussion in a chat room of 5 people counts as the "will of the entire citizenry" since several citizens were involved and no objections were made.

EDIT: DS, 24 hours may be too much, how about 12 hours?

 

[Immortal]

oh no, not the turnchat war again!

Lets ignore the turn chat and make the rule completely broad, to apply to all circumstances.

How long before the turnchat do we think things should be finalized? personally, I believe 4 hours before the chat discussion should be completely finished.

 

[Cyc]

The only way a chat room session could be seen as the WOTP is if there was no input from the citizens in the forum. If there was input from the citizens in the forum, then the chat room documentation would be weighed against that. This "chatroom documentation" would not be given priority over forum discussion. It would be blended in with it.

So is there a deadline for "legal Instructions"? The chatroom documentation would definitely have to be documented in those Instructions. Hopefully, the Leader who posts those Instructions would take the documentation from the Discussion thread about the issue (as whoever logged the chat would have posted it there).