[Cong] February Report & Participation Stats

Day 5,939, 07:55 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Speaker of the House


Order! Ooooorderrrr!

Welcome to the Congress Update for February ‘24. This report will summarise the proposals and activities of Congress over the past term. For those new to the eUK or to eCongress, Congresspeople have various powers outlined on the e-wiki. We have a small set of Congress Guidelines to help structure decision making and build consensus, particularly around how and when to exercise our in-game powers (of if you prefer, ‘buttons’).


This article contains various tables, on each you can click through to see a larger version. The stats are collected to aid transparency and assist PP’s in determining Congress lists, but are presented without judgement or expectation.

Health of the House

The Composition of Congress at the end of term is 13 TRS, 9 TUP, 7 UKRP, 6 WRP, 4 BEP, this total 39 Congresspeople. During the term, Georgelakeland left for a new life in sunny e-Japan. We wish him well - it will mean some of the percentages associated with UKRP’s turnout may change as you read across the below tables.

In the penultimate week of this term, the Speaker, Citoyen Vigneron stood down due to real life commitments. An election was held and Mr Woldy (me) was elected Speaker. As you may know from previous reports I love to compile and present data on the events in Congress, so I have a few tables below to summarise the activities of our honourable members.

For some updates from CV’s time in the Speaker’s Chair, you can check out his last two reports here and here.


This month there have been several proposals, five of which were subject to a vote. They were; a vote on donations schedules and paying Korea monies owed directly; three citizenship votes; and a Speaker election.

Regarding the Payment Schedule, the Government's proposal passed with the alternative suggestion to pay North Korea directly, losing by two votes. All three citizenship votes passed. Lastly Mr Woldy was elected Speaker in the Speaker election. Vote spreads can be seen for each of these proposals below.


Distribution of votes on non-admin proposals

There was also a proposal to alter the Citizenship guidelines used in the eUK, however this did not receive enough support to move it to a formal discussion and vote.


Engagement Levels

The below tables show the engagement and vote distribution for those proposals which could not be voted on via the Country Administration page.

Turnout

For the purpose of the Turnout scores, participating in either the debate or the vote has been recorded as taking part. This can mean more people are recorded as participating then there are votes cast.


Turnout for non-admin votes/Congress debates

Message and Feed traffic

I do not wheel this out every time I make a report but it is an interesting insight and spot check on the volume of discussion going through Congress. Each bar is a different member with their name replaced by their party. The data covers the opening of the Congress message and all traffic on the Congress message and Congress feed posts until 09:00 GMT Today (23rd Feb).


Volume of messages/feed responses made in Congress proceedings

This is complemented by looking at average posts by party, which you can see below. Typically speakers will post more so I have removed myself and CV from the data for the purpose of these averages, which also removes the largest contributor (spoilers it was me). This should make the below more representative. Both of these suggest a potential under-utilisation of feed posts over the past term as traffic has been directed more to messages.


Average volume of messages/feed responses in Congress proceedings

Here comes the science bit. This time around I have also calculated the spread of members across activity quartiles. For those interested in data in real life, this is a similar approach to how Gender Pay Gaps are usually reported. It involves ordering members by volume of contributions, grouping them in four quartiles (i.e. the quarter who made the fewest posts, two quarters of mid-level posters, and the quarter who posted the most) and in this instance, looking at the distribution of members in each quartile by party (not how much they earn!).

Again, I removed myself and CV to have a more representative sample. Each quartile contains 9-10 Congress Members and when interpreting them you should remain conscious of the makeup of the population, i.e. that TRS as the largest Congressional party will appear in more quartiles and BEP/WRP will appear in fewer.


Distribution of Congresspeople across ‘activity quartiles’

The last thing I would like to note is that there has been some talk about trolling in Congress. When I wrote my previous report in November, there had been a lot of disruption of this nature in Congress messages. It appears to me that this has largely improved - of all messages made by Congresspeople in the thread, only 6% contained insults/flaming/baiting and so on. That is quite low when considering the volume of messages moving through the group, and reflects a lot of conversation as being ‘on topic’. This does not reflect the behaviour of Congresspeople outside the messaging thread/other Congress channels, but it is nonetheless a positive reflection on the Speakers and participants involved in the message, and on the volume of traffic analysed above.


Proportion of posts free of flaming, insults etc

If you have any questions about the data or charts by all means get in touch, or if you have suggestions or questions about what else the data may tell us, just ask or comment!


Election day is around the corner and the Speaker may change, so I would like to share some loose thoughts on Congress as a whole and a few things I think could make some interesting changes based on my observations at various points from The Speakers Chair.

The Congress Guidelines have been working well, particularly in seeing off disruptive proposals which were almost two-a-penny at various points last year. I have noted that turnout tends to stay quite high if there is a constant flow of proposals, but can be killed off if there are too many. For that purpose I think it would be worth setting a bit of a timetable at the start of term and planning when to launch proposals, so there aren’t too few or too many. Such an approach would have to have room for emergencies and AoB type additions.

Congress ended with a largely positive discussion on the state of the nation. I think more such discussions should be encouraged, with general feed posts going up for people to speak their mind and ask questions. These needn’t necessarily lead to proposals, but conversations of that kind almost always flag issues or suggestions that wouldn’t have otherwise come out. The feeds are a particularly good place to have Congress business as the links are easy to keep and share and the public can see and contribute to the discussions.

My final thought, to borrow from Jerry Springer, is that Prime Minister’s Questions should become a fixture of the eUK’s Congress. Even if it is monthly. There’s a lot of space to try different approaches to it, and even considering doing it live in Discord (providing questions from non-users have been collected and are reported back). CV Did a great job of PMQs and it really shone a light on some topics that otherwise wouldn’t have been discussed, and gave Congress and public some insight into what the Government had been doing, which likewise may never have been discussed.

Thanks for reading,
Mr Woldy & Citoyen Vigneron