MoLA - Reform Plans: Repost & Updated

Day 1,848, 11:49 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Department for Education

Introduction

Hello, I am Sage Goku and I have been appointed Minister of Legislative Affairs by BigAnt for this term.

UPDATE: MoLA now has it's own org and newspaper (awaiting a rename) so I am going to seperate my personal and minister articles. Because I am deleting the original of this article, I am reposting it in the right place with updates on progress in BOLD.

As a 13 time Congressman, 6 time Party President, 4 time Minister and long-time contributor and author of all current Legislation I believe that I was one of the most experienced applicants and impressed BigAnt with a 3 page plan of reform in my application.

In this article I am going to talk about what previous MoLAs have done as many of you may be confused about what this Ministry actually does, then explain what I am going to do as MoLA and outline some of that plan for reform I gave to BigAnt.

If you are expecting a New Era article, this is not one of them!
Beware - heavy reading ahead. If you find yourself falling to sleep just close the article, this mostly just concerns Congress. Your Congressmen or Party President can explain what is happening in more appropriate detail to you. Don't quit the game just don't read it 🙂




What MoLA used to do

The Minister of Legislative Affairs' main role was to be a moderator of this forum who sometimes locked threads or moved a copy of popular threads to another forum for voting.

These threads would be about making laws for UK Citizens (usually Congressmen) to follow.

In 2008-2010 this forum was full of activity but recently not much has been happening:
2008: 17 Laws Passed.
2009: 36 Laws Passed.
2010: 9 Laws Passed.
2011: 5 Laws Passed.
2012: 1 Law Passed.

In 2011 all the previous laws were merged by me into two new laws. That pretty much solved the most common issues and left very little to discuss. The only issue outstanding is Citizenship which was 2012's single new Law.

Another reason for the lack of activity (UK Population has been at around 2000 for at least 1 year, maybe 2) is that most of you really just don't care about this stuff. It's boring and a bit overkill for a browser game.

So MoLA has been a bit of a non-job, especially this year. It has been given to players a few days old who then quit and were not replaced, not appointed at all, but usually given to Ministers who did nothing all month and collected his +1 Minister Experience at the end of the month. One or two tried a bit harder but nothing much really got done.

Not on my watch! This will change.




What MoLA is going to do

1) I am going to move as much Congress communication as possible into the game.

Many Congressmen never make it to the forums and spend their days declaring war, proposing random taxes and minimum wage rises. We never got them all to join the community and recently several parties have left the forums for political reasons.

I will bring the community to them and open group private messages involving all Congressmen right here in the game. Public communication can be done in articles.

If anyone complains of being excluded now, they have no excuse 🙂

UPDATE: This has been done, 90% of Congress are now included in information sharing and discussions under this system. This is about double the reach of the old system.


2) I am going to initiate discussions and contact between Congressmen.

Congress has sometimes been very inactive, enough for some parts of the UK Community to commonly flame and insult them. Months have gone by without anything happening, sometimes even the New Citizen Message has talked about Presidents from months before.

I will open an announcement group message for communication between the President and the Senior Ministers. I will then open an additional group message to discuss general issues. A third will be opened on a specific topic to discuss, the first being Tax Cuts.

This will get Congress working together much more!

UPDATE: This has all been done, the dicsussion on tax was very active and is just about done and should be proposed in game tomorrow. Here are the logs for investigative journalists to examine. We will have a discussion on Foreign Affairs next at the request of the MoFA.


3) I will creatively bypass unhelpful game mechanics to make all of this work and introduce some nice features.

You can only have 30 people in a group message; we have 40 Congressmen then several more Ministers not in Congress.

Congress will be split into two groups, half in each, to get around this rule. I will update each group with what the other group is saying and Party residents have been invited to appoint a Congressman to be in both groups to represent their party.

Some will complain about "spam" but you guys chose to be elected so it's your job to read what each other thinks. Even if there are 20 replies, it's all contained in one message and not destroying your inbox.

UPDATE: This is working somewhat but there are a few kinks to iron out, I expect this to gradually run more and more smoothly over the month. If Congressmen don't like it then there is no reason why we can't move the discussions to a forum and keep the announcements.


4) I am going to encourage IRC activity and voting "strikes" to boost coordination and lessen rogue proposals.

If you have been in Congress recently you would have seen the inactive #uk.parliament Rizon IRC channel. You may even have seen confusion as junior government ministers told you to vote one way on a war in the morning, then a more senior one the opposite in the evening.

I am going to try to publish activity records of Congressmen, tracking who is online in the evening and how often. I will also encourage voting to ONLY happen in the evening (there is no rush) so that rogue proposals can be caught without having the President online 24/7.

If this is not good timing for players in other time zones, arrangements can be made let us know.

UPDATE: Haven't started promoting this yet.


5) I am going to find a Citizenship System which all parties can agree to.

A new Citizenship System was voted in by some Congressmen last month but 2-3 Top 5 Parties do not have to follow it. If half of Congress is letting in people blocked by the other half then it's not working and is pointless.

I will coordinate with the Top 5 Party Presidents, perhaps even some outside who regularly get Congressmen, to draw up a system all agree to. We already had one meeting the other week and it went very well, with everyone agreeing to having acceptance guidelines.

I will be tracking who is coming in and out and publishing this. Please make safe choices when giving out Citizenship Passes until we can fix the system.

UPDATE: Contact has been made with PPs but discussion is light. I will open this up for Congress and everyone else to discuss when we have a window and possibly draw up some tentative guidelines myself.


6) I am going to expand the role of MoLA.

More on this after the above has been set up and started, but one idea I am very keen on is having MoLA do Citizen Awards with Gold Prizes (I'll pay for it Carlini!). I would also like to work on community relations between the two sides of our divided country.

UPDATE: I haven't started this on purpose. I am concentrating on reforming the core part of the Ministry this week and will look at these once everything is running smoothly. One new idea I have is renaming the Ministry "Ministry of Law" for newbie friendliness and having mediation services for arguments between players.


I am aiming on being the best MoLA ever so please let me know if you have any issues or ideas 🙂