Party Presidents negotiate on the future of the Netherlands
Henry Ackerman
My fellow countrymen and -women,
The past weeks have been quite hard as I had to combine my efforts in these negotiations with my job as Minister of Foreign Affairs. But I can say that I am delighted with the progress that we have booked with the majority of the parties. I shall try to explain the development of our negotiations and what we eventually agreed and disagreed upon.
The first aspect that we discussed was Revvenge's proposal, as he explained it in his article quite a while ago. We agreed that the concept of Party Representatives was not a good way to handle the process of voting. Only GEN. DE LA REY, the president of ReL insisted on the fact that the PP vote is needed if the process of voting is to happen fluently.
Negotiations are, thus, to be continued. However, they are becoming more difficult as ReL threatens to isolate itself from any further developments, which in my personal opinion is a true dissapointment. For now we have come to the conclusion the following terms are needed to reform our political system.
2) The chairman of congress can not delete any posts or just remove peoples access.
3) The chairman of congress can not lock discussion topics.
4) Notifications will be sent via mass messaging to Congress Members when a vote/debate is taking place.
5) The dictatorship will be abolished until the need for it returns.
6) Forum will be cleaned up and made more clear, all threads that we don't use will be deleted.
These terms are all still negotiable and we will try our very best to solve this problem once and for all. We ask you all for your co-operation and understanding. Any questions can be asked through me, as I took initiative to start this temporary task force.
Thank you all in advance.
Sincerely, on behalf of the rest of the party presidents,
Henri the Eleventh
Further developments will be communicated through this newspaper and the Staatscourant
Comments
1. It was discussed before and nothing happened
2. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA sure and I'm batman
3. Hahahahahaha sure
4. Don't spam please
5. The only good idea
6. We proposed that and nothing happened, oh wait we were banned
You need support and sadly you do t have it.
you are banned because of your behaviour. so stop.
Ffs just leave the game with dignity
well if the rel pp is unwilling to work with the rest of the country perhaps 1 or 2 of their more influential members should be included in future talks.
1 and 4: if a notification is sent i don't really see the need for a 48 hour voting period.
2 and 3: The CoC can't just willy nilly remove access he has to abide to the law that was ratified by congress. and it's only used in extreme cases. like 2 times in the last 2? years. Why can't the CoC remove posts or lock topics? it's part of the administration tasks he needs to do. admins like to keep out of the debating section(s) (unless absolutely required).
5: It would costs us a lot of money to abolish it, until we know what the "running costs" are for keeping a dictator i don't see a problem with keeping the dictator in place.
6: something i can agree with although the idea's i've seen floating around where far to extreme for my tastes. a few of the subforums could be abolished and merged but it's not like we can simply do all with just 2 of those in total.
Says the one who ruined the whole forum with a bad administration and abuse.
This is pretty fun to read and actually see.
Alex the best123
Alex the best123 to Auggustus and 3 more people | one hour ago
I have to agree with gen. de la Rey here, this proposal does not work for us. And ReL and GPN do form a majority.😁
I only saw that message when I had already posted this, sorry
no worries, you can still change it in the article.
Yeah you know in our talks it is just us party presidents, not all congress members. As most of us disagree with the pp vote, it has become non negotiable.
You're basically saying that while you guys invited GPN and ReL to speak about a way to get them back in the fold, you are going to ignore what they say because they are in the minority in a PP only conversation, regardless of how big their parties are. Good job at circumventing democracy.
If three party presidents disagree versus two. This wasnt put to vote yet and the points shouldnt have been made public in their infancy. But hey, your plan is better roght.
ReL and GPN together are the majority of the eNL Congress (15 out of 27), so I don't understand why you would picture it different. It's not ReL that "threatens to isolate itself from any further developments" but the disappointment is really about the 3 smal parties DemNL, VN and I&W. I hereby call upon their party presidents to return to the negotiation table, and stop this nonsence.
there are only 26 recognized cm's. since 1 is blacklisted. (with every party voting in favor) and not all of those 15 rel/gpn cm's agree with their pp's. and in the end this is something that needs to be decided by congress not pp's.
and even if the proposed pp is the person that gets to vote for all cm's proposal gets accepted. how would you even do that? since you don't have an account on the forum (at least not on this account?)
We are negotiating, the fact is we mostly agree as party presidents in the negotiations that the pp vote is not the solution, then rel mainly threatened to boycot again. You see my issue. Water bij de wijn, google it, because thats what we need to do.
Time to face reality: If in RL the current government (2 parties) doesn't like something and the other 11 do like something it isn't going to happen as well.
As for compromises, I have not seen one from notable figures from I&W/DemNL either. They want to keep the old system with 'minor adjustments' which will only delay the problems for future generations. I rightfully agree if the majority of people in eNL disagree on that. In fact, as long as ReL or GPN is not making a sound, the people on the forum continue business as usual. So who exactly is stopping progress? If ReL/GPN is, people like you are just as much. But that's doesn't pass through your skulls, because you believe yourself to be more intelligent and wise than the 'peasants' and 'sheep voters' of ReL and GPN.
The proposal from Revvenge is at least a genuine change and the only one currently been offered. Banning the quorum or changing the spelling of a few laws is far from what we'd like to see, as that doesn't solve the misrepresentation or the insane corruption that the various forum position can offer.
We are talking with eachother. I, auggy and Henrii disagree on the PP vote so it is us against GDLR and the gpn pp. So its not in our proposal.
Wait. So 3 parties that represent a minority of the populace and seats get to decide over 2 parties that are the majority? This, once more, proves sitting with only the PPs and not giving their voice a weigh based on the size of their party is dumb. The more fractured a side is in parties, the more power it has somehow...
REL and GPN (mainly REL) are acting like little spoiled brats and throwing a hissy fit because they do not get what they want. They are blackmailing people because if they do not get their way they won't come to the party. That's just childish behavior, they should start thinking about what is good for the country and acting like adults and stop acting like spoiled brats
I don't understand this reply. People of ReL and GPN are discussing, as is evident in this article and replies. Just because they have a different opinion doesn't give anyone the right to paint them off as childish brats. They too could say vica versa that the others are childish brats because for them it's ''the forum or the highway'' as well. Seems like we're all the same bad people beneath the line. 🙂
Guys Wtf. Seriously all were doing is having a discussion on how the parties can best work together to improve the situation. Bitching like this is the reason we are talking. If we can all agree on a platform we move forward.
The 48 hour voting is good because some people are not on every day, and in the case of important matters its good to have extra time on it. 24 hours wont break us.
As for the PP voting, the argument was that it would ensure for faster voting, while the other half are stating that it puts the power in the hands of a few, which counters the argument they were making for more transparency. A number of ideas have been floating around, but needs to be worked out.
I believe one of the reasons for PP voting also was the fact that way votes will represent the in-game voting results way better as atm we lack CM and even have some that never intended to be active on forum in the first place resulting in an even more mismatch between game and forum.
Naturally it'll all stand or fall on PP activity but as you only need 5 active players that way instead of 40 that will be way better to achieve. Plus parties will really be able to make a difference. Now a party program has no value whatsoever for CM voting behaviour where it will have with PP voting.
Some very predictable responses above which won't help. But that's no surprise sadly.
I'd say keep this up! (Trying to) get aligned with other PP's for sure can be the start of change as it won't start on forum. Once forces are joined outside forum it could become possible to change matters there.
I find this article very unfortunate, and I'll try to explain why:
First of all, as soon showed, you don't have the support of all Party Presidents with the proposal, as ReL already pulled out at the time of your article and GPN has shown to not be supportive soon after. That means the proposal doesn't have a majority in any sense.
On top of that the shooting down of my own proposal is no surprise, as Legendardisch has been against me personally for a while now, I&W stand to lose a lot and haven't agreed so far, meaning only one more vote against would be "a majority" in this group of five.
In addition, while congress already is a misrepresentation of the votes, just the Party Presidents is even more so. I could start a party today and demand a seat on this council, meaning a new party with 0 votes is equal to major players like ReL. These parties are not equal and therefore should not be handled as equal.
As for the proposal itself:
1: Removing the quorum is not wise. As I've pointed out before, this only leaves the voting even more up to who is active, meaning less active parties can be ignored. A party like ReL, who has more popularity than active congress members would be hurt, while I&W, who has the opposite, would reign supreme. Basically in vacation time you could pass important issues with as little as 1 person, though that seems unlikely. In reality we've seen votes where about 30-35% vote or even less, which skews the political landscape even more than it already is. A eleviating factor is the extended vote times, but I don't feel that saves the proposal. We should rely less on activity and timing, not more.
2. While the CoC currently can't remove access, while I understand where that idea comes from, I can see why this is. It's probably a good idea and might be wise to instead rephrase it to saying the CoC is only allowed to apply his CoC rights, not his Admin rights, while he is in office.
3: I somewhat agree with this one. I feel some discussions can be closed, but it's hard to lay down guidelines or rules and not find a CoC who will abuse the loopholes. I think locking innocent discussions after a successful vote is fine (like electing new CoC and such). Also separating a new discussion when the discussion is moving off-topic, especially after a vote, is also fine and the old discussion might be locked if on-topic not much can be said about it anymore. However, active meddling in discussions should be avoided and limiting the power the CoC is allowed to employ is probably the easiest way to accomplish that. Unfortunately our community isn't active enough to make sure candidates are always respectable.
4: While I'll admit I haven't always done this, this should probably be common practice. We might even look into add-ons for the forum so Parliament is automatically PMed when a Vote is posted, but I'm not sure that's possible in PHPBB.
5: That is dangerous, from what I understand. We should wait until the dictatorship upkeep in introduced.
6: I'm not sure why this is necessary. From my experience with forums, a "cleaned up" forum generally looks empty and unused. A lot of old threads are interlinked (votes referring to debates; lists referring to votes). A reordering of the sub-forums might be nice, but the threads are, in my opinion, not the issue. Also this should not be a decision taken so lightly, because once they are gone (assuming they'll be hard-deleted), they can't be recovered so easily.
Only responding to the issues related to the actual workings of the forum:
4. An addon probably won't exist, but if people actually want this I can code it myself into the forum.
6. Currently, nothing gets hard-deleted automatically on the forum. And for any small cleaning actions, people can just contact me, no need for a big discussion 😉
In may opinion, Revvenge, you make fair points. But I'm really not happy about you putting your plans to a vote, while we are still talking... it's quite impolite, which is why I voted 'no' on all proposals.
Honestly I mostly did it because I find it strange that a board of 5 people gets to decide which proposal goes. This is taking the arguments against the forum by ReL and GPN to the extreme. I feel a board of Party Presidents, where each party suddenly is worth 20% rather than their real part in congress or among the population, and are made up of people who in no way have to answer to their party or voters and therefore decide based solely on their own opinions, can not just wipe a proposal off the table. I want to see whether among the congress there is more support for the proposal. On top of that I've been waiting a little bit to see how things progressed and had been debating putting up the vote for a while. In fact, this morning I woke up intending to put up the vote, and saw this article. I don't think this has enough traction for me to put off the vote.
Well if you put it that way, it sounds a lot more logical. However, I think you should have announced the vote first, for this is the kind of communication from government officials that people seek so badly...
There have been a number of articles about this a while back. Even if I haven't announced the vote, I think this proposal isn't coming out of the blue. The proposal bogged down a bit when our previous CoC went inactive. In short, this proposal has been around for a while and did warrant a vote.
As for the whole internal debate, I feel this is not going anywhere. The points about the CoC PMing people about votes is fine, but has already been said many times and is an easy point. CoCs behaving more neutrally and honestly is also logical and has more to do with who you vote in office rather than needing rules, if I'm totally honest. Abolishing the quorum is a bad idea and has also been shot down on the forum before. All those points come from Legandardisch, which we've seen before on the forum. Everyone wants to get rid of the dictatorship, as it has always been a necessary evil, but we're waiting for the opportunity to safely do so. The only new things is the forum clean-up, which I've never heard complaints about before and I'm not sure solves anything. In short, I feel like this is a typical debate between political parties where there are no real results. All things they agree on are stuff that everyone already agrees on and therefore does nothing. No compromises have been made. In short, I think this proposal and talks have no traction and I don't see it coming to anything. I don't see why the entire country should wait on this.
Can't we just archive the threads that aren't used? Deleting them all seems a little rash.
I can agree with that 🙂
Deleting is pointless, archiving is indeed the way to go!
I'm sorry Henry XI. I think you give it a good try, but looking at the comments on this article I've come to the conclusion the discussion had been hijacked by Legendardisch.
While the set-up had been to try and see how to get ReL and GPN to get back, they have instead been set aside as the minority in the discussion, as they were 2 vs 3 and the size of the parties was not taken into account. Instead at number one on the proposal was a way to be able to ignore them outright, as their boycott doesn't matter anymore once the quorum is removed.
I'm not sure how the discussion went exactly, as I wasn't there, but with a quote like this "Yeah you know in our talks it is just us party presidents, not all congress members. As most of us disagree with the pp vote, it has become non negotiable." by Legendardisch it shows GPN and ReL had no power in the discussion as long as none of the other 3 would agree with them, begging the question whether the debate ever gave the true chance for them to press their demands. Opinions should have been weighed by party size (be it votes in congress election or congress seats), but instead it seems to have turned out that each party was valued equally.
I put this to you: If I and someone else decide to each start out own party splitting from ReL, blocking the forum, meaning we get a seat on this debate, suddenly we have the majority and we get to put forwards our demands. Would that be fair? No, it's just as unfair. The only benefit would be that by pure coincidence these 4 parties (of which 2 are hypothetical) represent the majority of the people as well, but that is coincidence.
It seems that while the talk was to get them back, ReL has been ignored as being the only one not to agree, and later on GPN also turns out to not agree, but it doesn't matter as 3 parties agree. Just not the ones this whole debate was for. I appreciate the effort, but it seems it was hijacked. Maybe rethink how to approach it for a next time.
"(be it votes in congress election or congress seats)"
votes the 3 parties win. seats the 2 parties win. if you only go by pp representing their entire party. and we all know from rel and gpn (at the very least) that is not the case. so how can we go all black and white and expect the pp's to do votes for their entire party?
but since this is something that should be solved by congress and not pp's this discussion should be taking place on the correct platform and that is the forum.
also your idea of splitting off into a new party is a pretty bad example since the 6th party we already have in eNL wasn't included 😉
Ofcourse i hijacked the discussion.. while I and others brought ideas to the table rel said they didn't like it, nothing else.
Forum cleaned up but taking away the adminstrative powers from the CoC? How would that work exactly?
we weten de naam van het probleem: hij heet Odan...
Één iemand kan nooit het probleem zijn als iedereen gewoon eens komt stemmen op een CoC.
To some extend you're right, but it can't be denied he has created a hostile debating environment in a recent term as CoC. I think it's not so strange some people are hesitant, to say the least, about using a platform where he is admin, regardless of whether or not he is currently abusing that power.
I will agree though that some of the terms he's had as CoC were simply because no one showed interest in taking the job.
This so called negotiation has just become another platform to insult our members and our parties, so we have called an end to it.