How We Can Simply Increase Congress Activity

Day 2,923, 02:10 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by HebronGazelle


Today I thought I would talk about a very important topic that is often brought up but not enough people seem to try and tackle, and when they attempt it they don't do very well. Congress is one of the most important groups in the eUK as they have the power to make laws and generally decide on the path that the eUK takes towards the future. An active Congress is very beneficial as we all know, but each month it is spoiled by some players who join Congress and decide to do absolutely nothing. Hopefully this article will give some ideas on how parties can attempt to tackle this problem.


Party-Congress PMs

This is something that ESO has been trying out this month, and for the past 6 days we have been adding something extra to it to increase our parties activity in votes (which appears to be working). What each party, or a single person in the party, could do is set up a PM with all Congressmen from their parties. It takes about 5 minutes to add everyone as friends and set up the PM. This PM is a less cluttered way for Congressmen to say why they are voting what way, and to remind other Congressmen to vote. I don't believe the ESO PM has taken discussion away from the main Congress PMs, but it has helped us get more players thinking about why they are voting for what they vote for.

Now when Voodoo won the PP elections 6 days ago he told me to act as a Chief Whip for the party and get our Congressmen voting. We had a look at our activity before the election and found many members weren't voting in Congress votes. Four of our members could not even achieve greater than 50% voting attendance! For the past 6 days I have simply been posting the voting link in our party's Congress PM and putting a message on the party feed to say we have a new Congress vote up. This seems to be working so far. Over the past 6 days we've had 4 votes and these are the attendance stats:
87.5% (seven out of eight)
100% (eight out of eight)
75% (six out of eight)
87.5% (seven out of eight)
Which comes out to 28 out of 32 votes successfully cast (87.5% attendance - an average of 1 member missing per vote). This is far above the Congress average and has increased the activity of every member based on before and after! It works...


The 'We Just Got 100% Attendance' Dance


When Selecting Congress Lists

We have a Congress election coming up in 4 days and PPs have the chance to choose their party's lists. Some parties will have a system to choose their list but I suspect many do not. ESO doesn't have a clear system for choosing the list. If we want an active Congress we need a way of punishing those who don't vote. PPs should be first choosing those who were active in Congress for the previous month and those who weren't in Congress in the previous month. Those who were in Congress but didn't have a high voting attendance should be dropped down the list and reminded why that has happened. Simple. They can wait another month to have another chance to prove themselves. Now PPs don't have to solely base their list on this but if it is an important factor it should increase Congress activity.

Now this all sounds simple but hasn't really been happening so far. You can look at several party lists each month and see inactive people (in terms of voting or just in general) towards the top of the list, and more active people below them. If your PP wants to choose inactive people to represent your party, you might want to consider whether they are fit to lead your party. Not having enough active people in the party is different, but all top 5 parties should be able to find enough active members to fill 8 places on the list.


Me reacting to damn stupid Congress lists


So What Now?

Voodoo is presumably giving me until the 15th to stay on as Chief Whip. I might try out a few more methods to increase Congress voting attendance but the problem is now that most of our members are voting in every vote so I cannot try anything. Hopefully some other parties will try the method above and see if it increases their party's activity in Congress, and if not they will try something else.

Once we have a majority of Congressmembers voting in every vote it should become an expected standard which will lead to future members doing the same. Once this happens we can look towards getting more members involved in discussions, but we need to take one step at a time.


So are you all going to try it?



Remember, try to get your party to use the methods above! We need an active Congress to help govern the country. If your party tries out the PM and vote link method please let me know how it goes, it should increase activity.

Thanks for reading,
CheetahCurtis