In-game voting - can it work? (Spoiler: YES)

Day 4,035, 13:22 • Published in Netherlands Iran • by Janty F


Greetings, citizens of eNetherlands

I planned to release something Christmas-related during the weekend, but before that, I will come up with something a bit more boring... voting laws. But do not tune out yet! I promise it will be worthwhile, because I am going to tackle the issue of in-game voting (as opposed to Forum voting). I promised to start solving during this month as Chairman of the Congress, and I have been reminded today to follow on my promise. And this article is reponse to that.



Now - I will not talk about specifics and details of Dutch Law and its readiness for ingame voting in this article. Instead, I will show you an example of successful in-game mass message voting system, which I have been maintaining for around one year as Chairman of Congress in Cuba. And yes, we are not Cuba, but Netherlands, but this is just an example, so do not freak out 😉 . Their system is slightly different from the system we currently use, but it is tested and proved to work. So let's look at the Cuban system of in-game voting and discover, how it works without Forum.



First of all, you need to have voting document. Document owned by someone trustworthy (here it would be Keykeeper), where results of all votes are recorded by (d)CoC. We already have that in Netherlands. Check.

Secondly, you need to publish Congress reports in newspapers to inform people about decisions of Congress. In Cuba, this was difficult, because they only had one org, and that was reserved for Government, not Congress. In Netherlands we have our own Congress org with active Congress newspapers. Check.

Third, you need to have (d)CoC, who is atleast a bit competent and has all Congress members in friends. At this moment, Netherlands has that as well in form of Janty Willem the Conqueror. Check.



And where is the magic? Nowhere, really. Cuban Congress, just like ours, debates all proposals in debate messages for some period of time. Whenever the author of the proposal feels ready to have his proposal voted, he asks (d)CoC to start a voting message for him with all Congress members included. (d)CoC needs to open the voting message with all Congress members as soon as possible, because it is his job, and automatic MoNC will start against him, if he does not respond in certain period of time. If necessary, (d)CoC consults the author of the proposal in regards of grammar, unclear parts of proposal, etc.

The opened voting message looks like this:

Janty F to NoTie112 and 19 more people | 5 minutes ago #99999999

[Vote] Law amendment in Article 5 (MaartenW)

The (d)CoC opens the voting message about the proposal of Congress Member MaartenW regarding the law amendment in Article 5. The proposal is written below:

PROPOSAL PROPOSAL PROPOSAL PROPOSAL (or in case of some long proposal link to Gdoc with the proposal)

Vote is started on Day 4,000, 01:00 eRep time
Vote will end on Day 4,001, 01:00 eRep time

Voting options are: "Yes", "No" and "I abstain"

And that is all. People then write in the voting message their Yes and No votes. After 24 hours, (d)CoC logs in and writes in the voting message:
The voting is closed. (d)CoC will proceed to count the votes.

Then (d)CoC records all the votes in the voting document, and announces the result in the message.
The result is:
Yes: 10
No: 5
Abstained :0

The proposal is accepted. The results are recorded in the voting document (link here) and will be published in the Congress newspapers. This message is now closed.

... and that's it. Of course, there are some details (for example MoNC voting messages against CoC can be opened by anyone at any time; or the fact uncooperative CM's with no friends need to be contacted in separate voting messages... ), but the vast majority of Cuban votings followed the simple example I showed above.



And I ask: If in-game voting works in other countries, why couldn't it work in Netherlands too 😉 ?