[SFP] The Case for a New Constitution

Day 3,592, 21:37 • Published in USA USA • by J.A. Lake

As you all know, I've become a proponent for rewriting the SFP Constitution. I know that's a statement that likely drove some votes to my opponent last week, but I've never been one to back down from a policy point because it wasn't unanimously popular. I think it is an important step we as a Party need to make, and in this article I want to spell out why I think that. I find there are three primary reasons:

1) The Constitution presupposes that a large number of people within the SFP are active and will want to participate in party governance.

2) The Constitution is bloated with segment after segment detailing procedure for plebiscites, what titles we might use, what our goals as a party are- these sections either have never been used (or were used in the distant past), are filler, or belong in a party program respectively.

3) The Constitution has not been updated since 2015, and has fallen behind the times. The game has changed.

Know that I'm not approaching this with an ulterior motive- I've made housekeeping my goal in this month's term. I want to get the party organized, to make it so that we can find what information we need easily. I want to make the party user-friendly. Beyond all that, I'm inviting each and every member of the SFP into the process- there's no chance for me to do anything untoward without your okay. That said, let's begin.

1) The Constitution presupposes that a large number of people within the SFP are active and will want to participate in party governance.

This is to me the true elephant in the room. This month I opened the call for Revolutionary Committee volunteers and eleven party members joined. The Congress call yielded nine candidates. I've tracked the number of people using Daily Rations and for September peak usage was eight people.

The bottom line is that activity has fallen through the floor since the Constitution was written in 2011. There are no throngs of players scrambling for a position in the party government. The Constitution is written for a different game entirely- in 2011 there were thousands upon thousands of people playing, today the country is reduced to a few hundred. It is an inescapable fact that the community has shrunk, but we have not adapted to that.

Moreover, we must dispel with the notion that the majority of our players are active enough and care enough that we require rules for how they may interact with party government. The majority of people who care are in party government. Out of 91 members, 12 joined the Revolutionary Committee- that's 13% of the SFP.

We should adapt the Constitution to reflect the changing dynamics of the player base.

2) The Constitution is bloated with segment after segment detailing procedure for plebiscites, what titles we might use, what our goals as a party are- these sections either have never been used (or were used in the distant past), are filler, or belong in a party program.

Here's a link to the Constitution. Have we ever seen Part III, Section 13, Subsection 4 invoked? Could we possibly whip up 46 votes for anything? We had 60 votes for the Party President election, and that was with in-game reminders. Can anyone reading this imagine a circumstance where 60 SFP members would vote for something entirely meta?

I can't. Why bother filling out the Constitution with rules for that? Why do Section 4 and Section 5 of Part I exist- do we require someone telling us what we're allowed to call ourselves, or that any party member might start their own project or hold a role in someone else's? All of Part IV is basically a platform, not something that ought to be in a Constitution.

This makes it daunting to use the Constitution for reference. We have five parts, sixteen sections, and four subsections to search through if you want to find, say, the guidelines for running the Congressional primary. This is also not counting amendments- which apparently haven't been added to the Constitution post since 2015.

3) The Constitution has not been updated since 2015, and has fallen behind the times. The game has changed.

This is really a summary of the last two points. The community has shrunk, we have far less active players in the SFP, and the Constitution is written for a large, active community. What we have now is equal parts Constitution and Platform, and together the two have created a monstrous document.

This morning when I opened the Congressional Primary I had a party member alert me to the fact that the Constitution had been amended regarding the Congress Primary in 2015, yet the amendment was not recorded. For two years. If this document is so sacred to all of us, why have we not taken care of it?

The answer, I believe, is that it is not as important to us as we like to say it is. The answer is that few of us really heed the Constitution because it is vague enough that no one needs to read it- this much is obvious citing the situation with the Congress Primary Amendment of 2015. When is the last time any of us read the Constitution? Do we know it, truly? I wonder what the genesis of our attachment to it is. This relationship between Party and Constitution is exactly why I think it needs to be rewritten to fit the new game and the new party.

Rewriting the Constitution is an essential step towards modernizing the SFP. I think that if we make a project out of this, a party-wide project, it will be our biggest achievement in the past year at least. It will definitely give us something to be proud of, and it will be something constructive. With a reset like this, we can close out 2017 on a high note.

I ask you all to consider this with an open mind- for some the Constitution is something sacred, I acknowledge this. Some don't think it should be changed, let alone rewritten. We should respect those opinions, but we should also face the facts stated above with open eyes. Let's do something this month that we can all be proud of!

An Aside On Broken Windows

A while back I read a book called The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. It was an interesting book, but the chapter that captivated me was the chapter on the Broken Windows Theory. In brief, the theory goes that by being good stewards of the community, people living there would see their lives improve. By fixing windows, painting over graffiti, and so on people would be proud of their community and work to maintain it.

That is my philosophy here. I want us to make improvements to the party now so that we all have a greater stake in maintaining it. Nothing builds community faster or stronger than popular struggle toward a common end. If we work together, I know we will come out of this in a better place than we went into it- if nothing else, the eUSA is a broken window anymore. Let's start by replacing the pane in our corner, and we can move on to painting over the graffiti and pitching in for new siding.

Let me know what you all think in the comments!