Fanatican Sunshine Law

[ravensfire]

Proposal:

CoS amendments

[color=darkred]Add new section:[/color]
X.  Fanatica “Sunshine” Law
  a.  At the beginning of each term, or upon the adoption of this law, the 
      President shall create a thread in the Citizen’s Forum entitled 
      “Term X – State of Fanatica”, where X is the term number.
  b.  Each elected official shall create a post in that thread for their office.
    i.  Should an office be vacant, the President shall be responsible 
      for all duties under this law for that office.
c.  With a frequency of no less than every other turn chat, not including 
      special sessions, each official shall update their post with current 
      summary information for their office.

[color=darkred]Add to CoS B.3[/color]
e.  State of Fanatica thread

-- Ravensfire

 

[Chieftess]

Isn't that what the DP was supposed to do already? (give a turnchat summary)

 

[ravensfire]

Nope - read it carefully. Updates from all departments with summary of everything under their purview.

Governors:
Cities, number of citizens, status of citizens, food, shields, commerce, what's building, how much longer, next in queue

MoD:
Relative strength to all civs, makeup of our armies, wars, threats

MTT:
Techs researched this age, tech queue, current trades,

MIA:
Overall status (income, etc), overall culture status (see term 3 MIA)

MFA:
Diplomatic status with each civ, known treaties for each civ (including between other civs)

Pres:
Anything important not covered above (map of Fanatica, most recent t/c summary, etc).

Much of this information is lacking. Look at your MoD thread, CT. What's our status compared to other civs? How many troops do we have? That information ought to be there.

-- Ravensfire

 

[zorven]

If we do require this by law, is it best to have a thread as you describe, or could they put this info in their government thread? By the way, I wish we didn't have to legislate this - the leaders should already be doing this. I usually read almost every post and I must say I feel completely in the dark about the state of the game compared to when I was Pres.

 

[ravensfire]

Normally I would agree with you zorven, but I'm sick and tired of the lack of updates. Except for two offices (MFA and the Province of Alluares), no updates have been done. To some extent, I was part of that, in that I created no MIA thread - I will take full blame for that. I note, however, that the office of MIA is still absent.

I'm taking a page from how others operate, and going straight to the people with a full-blown proposal. If they won't do it willingly, we the People of Fanatica shall force our elected officials to shed light upon their actions, and provide us with regular, useful updates in one location!

Power to the People!
-- Ravensfire

 

[tao]

IMHO this is bull****. Okay. Too harsh. Let me formulate it more kindly:

Requesting this much effort form all officials requires a lot of time, which could be much better spend for more important things.

Most of the stuff can be seen much better from the save. We have citizens voicing opinions, voting in polls, etc. who don't even care to look at the save. (We have citizens and officials who don't even know the very basics about he game either. )

Before burdening these tasks on the officials, require each citizen by law to get properly informed.

 

[zorven]

tao, I agree that this info could be gotten from the save, although what happend during a chat cannot. However, lately most of the time I have to participate here is while at work (lunch and breaks), so I can't load and assess the save and then participate in the discussions. I have to use what is on the forums at the time. So, I see the benefit of having it all presented on the forum. I have always thought that is part of the duties of a leader position (maybe that is just my personal belief).

 

[Black_Hole]

i like the idea about the law, but one thing.... Why name it sunshine? jus a questions...

 

[ravensfire]

Originally posted by Black_Hole9
i like the idea about the law, but one thing.... Why name it sunshine? jus a questions...

In the US, many states have "Sunshine" laws that require most meetings of public officials to be available to the public. The workings of the Government should be available to the People, who elected people to the Government.

-- Ravensfire

 

[ravensfire]

Originally posted by tao
IMHO this is bull****. Okay. Too harsh. Let me formulate it more kindly:

Requesting this much effort form all officials requires a lot of time, which could be much better spend for more important things.

Most of the stuff can be seen much better from the save. We have citizens voicing opinions, voting in polls, etc. who don't even care to look at the save. (We have citizens and officials who don't even know the very basics about he game either. )

Before burdening these tasks on the officials, require each citizen by law to get properly informed.

This is exactly the elitist attitude that this law will work against.

Leaders are responsible to the People. We elected you. Leaders should communicate back to the People on a regular basis. This expectation that all information should come from the save is hogwash! There is no requirement that citizens have access to the save - yet tao wants that evidently. In fact, only the DP is required to have access to the save.

As a specific example, tao, look at your thread. The last post in your own Provincial thread from you is April 3rd. What's the status of your province? How are your plans coming along? How have current events altered your ideas? You give us nothing! No information! No updates!

Citizens! Demand respect from your leaders! Demand accountability! Demand your leaders come down from their high hill and give you the information you need!

Power to the People!
-- Ravensfire

 

[tao]

If it is elititist by your standard to look at and understand the save, I have no problem being elitist.

(Sarcasm on)
Oh. My bad. I forgot. This is a demo-game. Demo like democracy. Thus many leaders have little or no clue what they are doing. And why they are doing it. Apart from "looking good" to the people. And people have no clue what is going on. And are not really interested. As long as they have the feeling somebody listens to them.

Thus we need more marketing and pr in the game. Each official should have a pr office and a pr advisor. We need graphics, charts, flash animations, videos! And lots of it. Nobody wants to dig to the core of the things. People want entertainment. Next DG we should play as Rome: panem et circenses.
(Sarcasm off)

 

[Eklektikos]

Just passing through, but felt rather compelled to give my two cents on this particular issue.

Some people do not have the time to post here outside of office hours and for obvious reasons are not free to look at the save while at work. By failing to post reasonably detailed information about their department's area of the game, leaders effectively bar such people from participation in demogame decision making.

If you personally have plentiful free time and are free from restrictions as to what you can and cannot do at any given time of the day then consider yourself lucky, but don't assume that the same is true of every citizen here.

 

[Chieftess]

Originally posted by zorven
tao, I agree that this info could be gotten from the save, although what happend during a chat cannot. However, lately most of the time I have to participate here is while at work (lunch and breaks), so I can't load and assess the save and then participate in the discussions. I have to use what is on the forums at the time. So, I see the benefit of having it all presented on the forum. I have always thought that is part of the duties of a leader position (maybe that is just my personal belief).

Exactly. It's very easy to press F3 in the save and see that we have 28 knights, or X number of muskets. Not to mention, one thing people always seem to forget (and I keep reminding them of for demogames) is that people have Real Life things to do. They're (and to quote a REALLY old line I said once), "not gonna be sitting at the computer 24/7 refreshing the screen looking for a new post". In other words, not everyone has the time to do that. (Take Oct for instance, he's in school, so he can only post for maybe 5 hours a day, and even at that, he has to eat and do homework).

It's not that hard to take a look at the save.

 

[ravensfire]

Final Proposal:

CoS amendments

[color=darkred]Add new section:[/color]
X.  Fanatica “Sunshine” Law
  a.  At the beginning of each term, or upon the adoption of this law, the 
      President shall create a thread in the Citizen’s Forum entitled 
      “Term X – State of Fanatica”, where X is the term number.
  b.  Each elected official shall create a post in that thread for their office.
    i.  Should an office be vacant, the President shall be responsible 
        for all duties under this law for that office.
  c.  With a frequency of no less than every other turn chat, not including 
      special sessions, each official shall update their post with current 
      summary information for their office.
    i.  This information should include enough information for a Citizen
        of Fanatica to determine the status of all areas within the control 
        of each official and participate meaningfully in all discussions.
    ii. Should areas overlap, the officials should determine privately 
        how to divide the overlapped areas.  If this cannot be resolved,
        the President shall determine how to resolve the issue.

[color=darkred]Add to CoS B.3[/color]
e.  State of Fanatica thread

 

[Chieftess]

OK, now I see it. I had something like this in mind for DG2 in fact. (where each advisor had their own thread). That one never got too far off the ground though (people complained of too much work).

 

[zorven]

Originally posted by Chieftess
OK, now I see it. I had something like this in mind for DG2 in fact. (where each advisor had their own thread). That one never got too far off the ground though (people complained of too much work).

Sounds like you are describing our Government sub-forum.

 

[tao]

Let me do some nitpicking. I looked at the Three Books and found (just examples):

poll is open ...
MoI shall conduct a discussion ...
Proposal must be in Yes/No/Abstain format ...

What is the difference between is/shall/must ?

Each of these have been violated/ignored/disregarded frequently. OTOH some officials alread post information as proposed here.

Do we really noot this additional "law"? Will it have any positive effect? I doubt it.

 

[DaveShack]

I don't think we need another law just so it can be broken. Those who have time should update their threads, or a post in a common location, but those who do not have time should not be forced to do this. If the citizens really want only people with lots of time to be leaders, then have a debate question about whether the candidate plans to keep the information theads updated.

 

[Chieftess]

I think ravensfire should have come up with this during DG2 just to be on the masochist side.

We had up to 200 cities that game.

 

[ravensfire]

Originally posted by Chieftess
I think ravensfire should have come up with this during DG2 just to be on the masochist side.

We had up to 200 cities that game.

Ahh, but the leaders there did generally update their Government threads with information.

You see, my main reason for this is the absolute lack of information in many of our government threads. Our most active Governor has one of the least updated threads, and that's a shame. Most of our officials don't have even a basic summary in their offices. C'mon - a simple 3 - 4 sentance paragraph isn't that difficult or time-consuming to include.

Finally, with a simple, basic template, most of these updates are not that time-consuming. Good grief - during term 3 I was putting out summary information for ALL cities, in part because the Governors weren't. I knew where to click on the map for my screenshots. I think I had the screenshots down to 10 minutes from start to finish - including uploads and updates to the thread. The spreadsheets took longer, but I often found things to mention to Governors about their cities.

This has been talked about before by various people, and it hasn't produce results. Time to see if a 2x4 LART will correct the situation.

-- Ravensfire