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A quick (it was supposed to be quick, but turned into something not so quick...) report from the speaker's corner for the congress of March/April 2012.

Resignations

We had the following resignations from congress during the month:

* Ex Banned'it
* Gary Delange
* Lev Hilaciam
* Rexdeus

The speaker was informed of all the resignations except for Lev Hilaciam's resignation.

Activity report

I was going to post here some stuff about activity from members, but in general, most members seemed active somewhere, either in the game, forum or IRC. If congress can keep up a pace like this, it will mean we can work towards a better eSouth Africa.

Congress incident

While it pains me to bring this up, this does need to be mentioned and I cannot simply ignore it in my speaker's report. The incident...

This month, I tried something new as speaker and that is to bring some of the forum activity in-game. Instead of letting everything happen simply in the forum, I used the mass-PM facility provided by the game to ensure that all of congress is included and keep up their activity.

It worked quite well for most of the month, but an incident last week brought my trial crashing down. As speaker, I tried to keep things light-hearted and following a mistake by accidently including one of the members who resigned in a mass-PM to congress, my light-heartedness (trying to admin, but brush off my mistake) was turned into banter and short before long, someone took it completely the wrong way and we saw the type of fights I last saw between Jaccil and Frank Furglar. In fact, it didn't even end there - in the wake of this, we lost some good players and it's unfortunate that it had to turn out this way.

This entire trial/experiment was to include people who refuse to go onto the forum or IRC due to whatever reason. It was done to create a cohesion between congress members, which for the most part, I felt that I had achieved. Unfortunately, for some however, they are simply in it for themselves. These are the people who think that congress is 40 individual people who only have to click a Yes or No button every once in a while. It doesn't work like that - if you want to be in congress, for the most part, you need to interact with other people - you need to have a little patience, some sense of humour, a bit of understanding and a whole lot of tolerance. These are the things that make for good social interaction.

When you are in congress, you are part of a group of 40. Put differently, you are not a member of congress, you are actually a 40th of congress. You are part of the bigger thing, you cannot change taxes alone, you cannot declare a natural enemy alone, you cannot impeach the president alone - you need other members of congress. Refusing to interact or communicate with other members of congress means that you are no better than another citizen who happens to click yes or no from time to time.

If you want to be part of congress, you need to accept that you will have to communicate and interact with others. If you don't want to do this, then don't run for congress.

The entire political module of this game is about social interaction. If you don't want to socially interact with others, then stay away from politics.

The outcome

Following the incident, everyone involved seemed to have made up. We had some casualties along the way with two resignations from the country, however, for the people involved, my understanding is that they sorted out their differences.

My decision not to invoke any of our laws to censure them or hang them was made for several reasons:

* The incident included a non-congress member. As speaker, I have no authority over ordinary citizens.
* There were about 30 responses to the mass PM which was addressed to 30 people. That gave 900 opportunities for people to click the report button if they were not happy with what was going on.
* As Speaker, my main task is to ensure that congress members don't kill each other and act appropriately. Following the incident, everyone involved made peace with each other and I therefore saw no reason to take any further steps. There was no continuous disruption and it's all over now.

I am aware that some are upset by the way that the law is applied differently across terms. It's the nature of things and the example of tolerance that I wanted to set (although at one point I also lost my cool). Hopefully in future, other speakers will learn from this and realise that they don't always have to jump to the harshest of penalties. Things sometimes just sort themselves out and that's ultimately where we want to be: a place where things are sorted out. Censuring everyone involved would not have let this have a different outcome to this.

Conclusion

I wish to thank congress for allowing me to be speaker during this term. It has it's ups and downs, but the best part of it was for me to learn some lessons in terms of the interaction between people. Despite a few ups and downs during this term, I can definitely look back and say that I learnt something.

Best of luck during the upcoming elections and for the incoming congress.

mulderpf
Speaker of Congress