The Congressional Inactivity Debate: My Contribution.
Wilhelm Gunter
I’ve just been on IRC now, and watched what may loosely be called a debate (maybe more of a battle of insults?) between Aeriala and Rylde over how inactive Congress has been on the Forums, and all the details that go with it.
Is this why the eCanada congress can't get a quorum?
I see both sides. I see and understand the desire to have more active, dedicated, constructive congressmen elected, rather than those who simply take the 5 GOLD and never show up. To have an intelligent, working congress can only be in eCanada’s best interests. Getting new ideas, debating and improving ideas others have submitted, to come up with a better (or best?) option for Canada to walk down is clearly a win-win for all involved.
However, I disagree with this side when they vociferously create a boogeyman to blame, called the SVT – or Strategic Voting Teams. This is for two reasons which I will discuss here.
Firstly, as a SVT manager over many many elections, I’ve seen individuals (mostly noobs) who somehow get ridiculously high number of votes (both in the CPF and in other parties) all on their own, without the help of the SVU. Now this is not to say that SVT do not do what they have been accused of; I’m sure it’s happened, and I’m sure I’ve done it myself. But certainly not all the blame can be laid here.
The second reason I suggest that SVT are a boogeyman – a scapegoat, if you will, is that the SVT offer political parties one of the few, if only areas, they can actually act in a partisan manner which brings a meaningful result – the number of congressional seats they can claim. If there were not this fight, this battle, that political parties lose essentially their only partisan battle. Political parties essentially become meaningless, if , as supporters of this position, suggest that all the Party Presidents of the top 5 parties actively work together to put forth only eCanada’s best. In short, we would have a one party system, with 5 leaders working together. (Is this even workable in practice, given our egos?! And if we could get it to work, would those leaders be re-elected? Egos and pride are just lurking in the background, and if the Top 5 Party Presidents could somehow contain it within themselves, be assured that other less noble individuals would not – and new Presidents would be quickly elected).
In addition, how would we get new blood into congress? We wouldn’t necessarily know until we tried. Sure, a system could be set up to ‘evaluate’ one’s activity in the media, on forums, on IRC, etc. but in doing so, are we really making things too complicated?
I suggest the “problem” (and I use the quotation marks intentionally) of inactive congressmen is simply a feature of eRepublic, or even more so, our desire to use on offsite forum to conduct congressional activity. Now in no way am I disparaging this aspect to eRepublic we have all come to understand and play. If we have ingame congressmen, then it seems natural to me that we have a place where we can debate, propose motions, and vote various items into effect. If we want the political module to be more entertaining, more resembling real life, then this is indeed the path to go. I am completely in favour of this.
But we simply cannot force anyone to join us – by its very nature, it must be voluntary. We cannot make ingame, elected congressmen join us on the eCanada Forums. There is no mechanism to do so. We must recognize this and accept it. Stop lamenting it. Yes, it is discouraging at times, or even frustrating. But there’s not much we can do to fix it.
Rather, I believe the problem lies with someone’s noble, but misplaced suggestion to have a 40% quorum for a motion to be considered properly voted upon. Noble, indeed. But as we have seen, not always workable. It is this quorum, however well-intentioned it is and was, which must go.
In short, it’s the system that is broken. A system that is partially built by us, the players, (who have created an offsite forum) and partially by the admins, in which they give us a political module which is incomplete. But within the confines of the game, I believe it’s the best we can do.
Accept this state of affairs, and get rid of the quorum. That’s my contribution to this discussion.
NOTE: If you got this far, you get rewarded by visiting snopes to read the actual circumstances of the above picture of elected officials playing solitaire while their legislature was in session!
Comments
Run blockers and only endorse those that will be active. I plan on making this standard MDP practice.
That is a very good point. It is an unfinished module or aspect of the game and we created a problem by trying to force eveyone to go to an off-site forum.
Well written and good points!
But we should still consider that the people we vote in should be active on the forums, because I do not see the forums and off-site aspect of eRep leaving any time soon.
Yep - Keep the game "In-Game"
No stupid forum rules
Propose anything you want. Vote Yes if you like it, Vote No if you don't
Check with your party president for the party's position on the vote if you/they care..
Keep the forums for the role-players
I agree with this, although I don't mind if going to the forum should be a plus either 🙂
im not inactive are you?
Simple thing is this:
Party leaders and staff should monitor who is running and make an official endorsement list of those who will be supported by the party in each riding.
If you elect shitty congressmen that are two week old noobs then it just goes to show how undisciplined your party is and we should all take turns pointing and jeering.
Banach, Rylde, though id love to indulge in your idealized version of politics, i think we need to get real. no party's been consistently able to block unwanted candidates.
Im inclined to agree with Wilhelm, the political module is at fault. its been broken since Beta, and since people dont typically buy gold for it, it gets little to no attention from the admins. Its a sad state of affairs, however it is how it is. Best we can do is educate our voters on which candidates are deserving, and avoid supporting bad candidates, even if we are unable to stop them from running under our banner.
I like Freecell