Council Vote - Ratification of Amendment 1, Turn Chat Threads

[Shaitan]

Each Council member should vote YES, NO, or ABSTAIN on whether we should ratify (sign into law) the amendment below. This poll will run for 48 hours (until 13:00 GMT on Sunday, June 2) or until an unbeatable majority of votes passes or defeats the ratification. In the event of a tie, the President will cast the tie-breaking vote.

This amendment passed a Citizen Discussion and a Citizen Vote.

Amendment 1: Chat Turn Threads, format and usage.

Thread organization:

• Chat Turn Threads will be placed in the Main Forum
• One Thread will be used per Chat Turn
• The Thread will be called “Chat Turn [game-startyear]”
• The Threads of the last and the upcoming Chat Turns will be sticky.
• Only the upcoming Chat Turn thread should be open. The others should be closed when all info is posted to stop misposting of information.

Post organization:
* First Post:
- real time and date when the chat will be held
- savegame which will be used
* Following Posts:
- chat turn instructions from the officials
- one post per department or province
* Next Post:
- used for uploading the intermittent saves during the chat (replace file in the post!).
- after the chat is finished, the last savegame replaces the attachment here. The ending year should then be noted in the post.
* Last Posts:
- Turn Summary
- Chat-Log
- Screenshots

 

[Chieftess]

YES

 

[Shaitan]

YES, based on poll returns.

 

[Rain]

Yes

 

[chiefpaco]

Yes.
From the Foreign Affairs.

 

[Justus II]

YES, on behalf of the Department of Culture

 

[Falcon02]

Yes

 

[donsig]

The constitution provides for a presidential veto in legislative votes (Section L, Article 5).

Article 5: Legislative votes are called by any Council member or the President. An affirmative result alters or amends the Constitution. The President can veto a legislative vote, preventing a change in the constitution.

According to article 2 of section L, this measure has passed the council vote since it has now received six affirmative votes out of a possible eight.

I hereby veto this measure and now set forth my reasons for doing so.

While I am in general agreement with the proposed turn chat threads I do not feel that rules governing said threads should be incorporated into the constitution. The constitution should be reserved for general principles regarding the play and organization of the democracy game. Rules concerning the organization of specific threads should be codified in an entirely different document. Whether this document will be *laws* or *regulations* (or both) is something that must still be worked out. Since the constitution should be a difficult thing to change and the organization of a specific thread should be any easy thing to change this amendment does not belong in the constitution.

As stated earlier I am in general agreement with the principle outlined in this proposed amendment and I do plan to adhere to the proposal as best as I can without restricting the flexibility for improvement that may be needed. I have a few specific reccomendations for improvement:
The threads should be named *Turn chat [starting game year], [real time date]
The first post should include the summary from the previous turn chat and/or a link to the previous turn chat thread.
The last post should contain a link to the next turn chat thread.
the turn chat thread should contain saves (or links to saves) for the initial save used during the turn chat, the end of turn 0, the end of turn 5 and the final save from the turn chat.

These suggestions are mainly meant as additions to what is already in the proposal, with the exception of the saves. Rather than saving over the older saves I think it is best to use the new file upload system. This would leave all inter-turn chat saves available to the public which could be valuable in case of public investigations.

If this proposal was made a part of the constitution then implementing these suggestions or any others for that matter would require citizen discussion, a citizen poll and a council vote. By the time this process would be completed a number of turn chats would already have come and gone. I recommend that this proposal (with the suggested changes) be incorporated into a document of regulations which would be easier to change than the constitution.

 

[chiefpaco]

Good call, donsig. There indeed comes a point where rules just aren't suited for the constitution. Plus, what works now, may not work later, (especially if we haven't tried it) and so on...

 

[Falcon02]

Maybe we should have a seperate Law Code? Seperate from the Constitution with a seperate process for adding and changing the specific laws. I'm not sure what this process would be but it would have to be defined in the consitution and simpler than amending the consitution. Also, the constitution would have to define what kind of changes would change the law code, and what kind of changes would change the consitution.

This way we can still have the generalities of the Consitution, but also the specific rules of Pheonetica.

 

[Plexus]

We could call it Donzigz/Fálkonz code.

 

[eyrei]

While I am obviously a little late, I would like to offer my support for the president's action. The constitution should contain general guidelines and a few specifications where needed for clarity. As times change, we may want to slightly alter the turn thread structure, and I, personally, do not want to see a great deal of time spent doing so.