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I’ve just been on IRC now, and watched what may loosely be called a debate (maybe more of a battle of insults?) between Aeriala and Rylde over how inactive Congress has been on the Forums, and all the details that go with it.


Is this why the eCanada congress can't get a quorum?

I see both sides. I see and understand the desire to have more active, dedicated, constructive congressmen elected, rather than those who simply take the 5 GOLD and never show up. To have an intelligent, working congress can only be in eCanada’s best interests. Getting new ideas, debating and improving ideas others have submitted, to come up with a better (or best?) option for Canada to walk down is clearly a win-win for all involved.

However, I disagree with this side when they vociferously create a boogeyman to blame, called the SVT – or Strategic Voting Teams. This is for two reasons which I will discuss here.
Firstly, as a SVT manager over many many elections, I’ve seen individuals (mostly noobs) who somehow get ridiculously high number of votes (both in the CPF and in other parties) all on their own, without the help of the SVU. Now this is not to say that SVT do not do what they have been accused of; I’m sure it’s happened, and I’m sure I’ve done it myself. But certainly not all the blame can be laid here.

The second reason I suggest that SVT are a boogeyman – a scapegoat, if you will, is that the SVT offer political parties one of the few, if only areas, they can actually act in a partisan manner which brings a meaningful result – the number of congressional seats they can claim. If there were not this fight, this battle, that political parties lose essentially their only partisan battle. Political parties essentially become meaningless, if , as supporters of this position, suggest that all the Party Presidents of the top 5 parties actively work together to put forth only eCanada’s best. In short, we would have a one party system, with 5 leaders working together. (Is this even workable in practice, given our egos?! And if we could get it to work, would those leaders be re-elected? Egos and pride are just lurking in the background, and if the Top 5 Party Presidents could somehow contain it within themselves, be assured that other less noble individuals would not – and new Presidents would be quickly elected).

In addition, how would we get new blood into congress? We wouldn’t necessarily know until we tried. Sure, a system could be set up to ‘evaluate’ one’s activity in the media, on forums, on IRC, etc. but in doing so, are we really making things too complicated?

I suggest the “problem” (and I use the quotation marks intentionally) of inactive congressmen is simply a feature of eRepublic, or even more so, our desire to use on offsite forum to conduct congressional activity. Now in no way am I disparaging this aspect to eRepublic we have all come to understand and play. If we have ingame congressmen, then it seems natural to me that we have a place where we can debate, propose motions, and vote various items into effect. If we want the political module to be more entertaining, more resembling real life, then this is indeed the path to go. I am completely in favour of this.

But we simply cannot force anyone to join us – by its very nature, it must be voluntary. We cannot make ingame, elected congressmen join us on the eCanada Forums. There is no mechanism to do so. We must recognize this and accept it. Stop lamenting it. Yes, it is discouraging at times, or even frustrating. But there’s not much we can do to fix it.

Rather, I believe the problem lies with someone’s noble, but misplaced suggestion to have a 40% quorum for a motion to be considered properly voted upon. Noble, indeed. But as we have seen, not always workable. It is this quorum, however well-intentioned it is and was, which must go.

In short, it’s the system that is broken. A system that is partially built by us, the players, (who have created an offsite forum) and partially by the admins, in which they give us a political module which is incomplete. But within the confines of the game, I believe it’s the best we can do.

Accept this state of affairs, and get rid of the quorum. That’s my contribution to this discussion.

NOTE: If you got this far, you get rewarded by visiting snopes to read the actual circumstances of the above picture of elected officials playing solitaire while their legislature was in session!