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My view on the legislation and our meta Congress, is that the system is good but we just do not have enough sufficiently active players to maintain it.

Only 153 votes were cast in the last CP election - that's one tenth as many as when I started back at the end of 2009. At some point we may have less active citizens than there are places in Congress and this is where the problem really lies.

Consider this article from the Autumn of 2008 - http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/14/erepublik-creates-a-worldwide-multiplayer-strategy-game/

2 comments from Alexis Bonte which stand out are:-

"But Bonte said that people who have only 15 minutes a day to play can fully participate in eRepublik. The game, while complicated, is thus considered “casual” in its appeal, more like a snack than a full meal."

“I was addicted to Civilization,” he said. “But I was also married and had a family. It was either play Civ or get a divorce. I needed a game that you could play 15 minutes a day.”

It was later stated that "The active members play about 14 minutes a day"

I'm sure we still have a good number of people in the eUK who do not do much more than this!

Now if you consider what is required from being a Congressman who needs to participate - it's not a 5 or 10 min job and historically people who considered a run for Congress would have done so because they could make time available. If you knew you had a busy month planned, you probably wouldn't even consider standing. Now we have many of the same faces recycled month in month out and inevitably people cannot commit considerable time out of their lives each and every month. Then once activity drops there is less for those that are trying to be more active to consider and discuss, so it becomes a vicious cycle until suddenly - nothing has been said for days!

We've tried a slimmed down Congress and that hasn't really succeeded. So maybe we should consider a different approach to Congress and Government?

For example:-

I think we should keep the Constitutional Dictatorship for the time being.
If necessary we should legislate to remove the elected Congress - it has no real powers under a Dictatorship according to game mechanics.
We could then establish wider legislation around the Government to ensure it is held to account - maybe we could establish criteria similar to the way the Dictator is chosen, so for example a certain number of citizens would have to sign a declaration calling for a vote of no confidence in the Government.
Maybe we could agree a form of inclusive Government, so that a greater number of positions are made and for example include the Commanders or representatives of the 5 biggest MU's in the MoD team - so that it is not the CP picking a team, other than the person at the top, but people having a right to be included in the decision making process whomever is in charge.

Whatever you come up with, people just don't care and can't be bothered. When we have democracy they get a notification for a vote, click on the in game vote, when there isn't something like that, people are mainly like meh.

WT to 4% - supported
Budget - supported

but most importantly of all - why are we not using the Speaker's newspaper?

I forgot to log in to the org 😛 will remember for next time

WT to 4% - supported
AMD's Budget - supported

WT to 4% - Supported
Budget - Supported

VOTE OPEN:

AMD's Budget

Please Reply to this comment with your vote

Aye

Aye

Aye

Aye

Aye

Aye

aye

Abstain

aye

PT has hit the nail on the head really, the system is fine but requires active congressmen to fuel it. Does the issue therefore lie with the system or with the PP's choosing congressmen or is it general decline of the community. Identifying which is important, and figuring out a solution to it might be challenging, particularly one which doesn't slide power into fewer and fewer hands.

What if, we made the entire eUK citizenship Congress members and reduced the role of 'Congress' in day to day government. I.e everything 'sensitive' is just handled by the Government with obligations on the CP to be open and accountable for those decisions. 'Congress' could just control the purse strings and have ability to impeach. Any citizen can propose a bill, have an elected Speaker.

Could try it, but I just wonder how many more people would contribute? If it's less than 40 then :/

I'm not sure there's that much to discuss right now - the government's efforts seem to be (rightly, in my opinion) focused on the Resource Wars. Everything else has taken a back seat. There's so many changes just happened/happening now/about to happen that it's hard to make long term plans. For instance, any financial planning will be affected by how our resources look at the end of this term and what effect the taxation changes and the movement of companies to specific regions will have on our income. Any kind of foreign policy initiatives will depend on how the alliance shifts play out, which seem to have been put on hold while everyone TWs everyone for a month.

Last month, when there were things to be done (like setting up the National MU) congress was reasonably active. Even the current congress started out fairly active, when we had to discuss training wars in preparation for the Resource wars contest. I'm not convinced the current lack of direction is a result of anything more than the futility of trying to legislate for the future in the midst of chaos.

Both supported

Both supported

Both supported.

Strongly suspect a huge problem with people participating in congress is that they have to wade through a ton of dross to find any post of import. That's why it takes so much time - it's the banter, not the issues.

The main contributor to the problem, IMHO, is the communication systems in this game. We can't get all of Congress on one message thread. IRC only works if everyone is in the same part of the world and online at the same time - if Aleks is on when he gets home from work, I'm off dealing with my day, and when I'm online, I suspect most of you are sound asleep.

Two suggestions that Plato should take on board - and which might help him turn this game around - are to extend the number of people in a message thread, and introduce a "bookmark" system where messages will open to the exact spot where one was when one closed the thread, possibly with a "x new messages" header at the top of the new string.

Agreed - Congressional communications have always powed a problem - and IRC simply does not do the job. In the past we have tried other alternatives, but none have stood the teswt of time,