hobbitween01, in post #77, brings up some excellent questions that I feel need answering. My response has taken me close to three hours to write. I know this is a very long and complicated post, but I feel it’s important for anyone interested in this topic to read this carefully, it explains a lot. I know it will take some time to read and digest, but believe me, nowhere near the time it took me to write it. BTW at the end of this rather long post is a question I have of all interested, think of it as a quiz to see if you read the whole thing.
First: of the four founding members we are voting for two representatives.
Second: Future representatives are to be chosen by the council itself, so this voting is a one-off
Third: the council, as a priority, will try to recruit members from small empires or people who aren't members of empires. |
First: Yes. Each of the four founding empires are selecting two representatives each.
Second: Yes. This initial selection of two representatives by each of the founding empires is a one time deal.
No. Future representatives will not be chosen by the council itself. It's the method of choosing future representatives that will be defined by the council. The exact nature of this future representative selection process (dare I say elections) hasn't really been discussed, however I can guarantee that there will be a very strong democratic (the process not the party) component to it.
Maybe. It's possible that the council may want to "draft" another representative or two from the pool of metaverse players that are either not in any empire or in a small empire during the interim prior to the definition of the future representative selection process.
Third: A priority (not necessarily the only priority) of the council is the definition of the aforementioned future representative selection process (elections). A primary goal of said process is that it should be truly representative of all metaverse players. Since at this point the large empires are represented, that leaves small empire and unaligned players disenfranchised. It’s this issue that the last sentence of the “constitution" was meant to address. Reading that sentence I can understand how the intended meaning wasn’t properly conveyed. I guess that any 50 word sentence should be wrong by definition so let me give this passage another shot.
“A priority of the council is the determination of a representative selection process that is representative of *all* metaverse players.”
This certainly follows the KISS principle far better than the 50 word sentence it replaces. One of the points that I was trying to make with the previous passage was that it’s the council that defines the future representative selection process. There had been suggestions that this process be totally defined within the constitution itself. It was to stave off this potential semantic disaster that I worded the passage the way that I did. However, the suggested replacement passage still contains the statement that it’s the council that determines the future representative selection process. The reason I use “representative selection process” instead of the more simpler term “elections” is that there is some possibility that the ability of large empires to directly appoint a limited subset of representatives may be retained by the future “representative selection process”.
| First point: the people on the council; are they acting with out weight but none of out input (true representatives) or are they acting with out weight, with out total input (advocates) or somewhere in-between? |
The people that will be selected by the four founding empires will be acting with the weight and authority of those they represent which are the four founding empires, no more, no less. There’s also some assumed commonality that metaverse player in the four founding empires have with *all* metaverse players, but we cannot presume to speak for all even though a lot of our concerns are the same as the concerns of all.
| Second point: It is traditional for the elective process to be finalized before a body becomes active, is this council an interim for us to finalize such questions democratically, or the finished article? |
I think I partially answered this in point three above. I think the closest answer is that this council is an interim for us to finalize such question democratically but hopefully without as much pain as been evidenced by this thread. We seemed to be having such difficulty with something that in effect was little more than a preamble that I felt it would be truly impossible to define anything as complex as an elective process within a thread like this. I felt that in order to make any real progress at all we needed the benefit provided by representation which is to streamline the process. However, with that all said, it’s a mistake to think that the only purpose of this council is to define the elective process of the council that will replace it. There are certainly a number of easy things (low hanging fruit) that can be done by the council as currently constituted. I have every intention to do everything reasonable to improve the state of the metaverse ASAP.
| Third point: This isn't so important, but are the 'minorities' getting two representatives same as if they were an empire? Or will we get one representative for SMALL empires and one for NO empires? |
Actually this is a very important point and the answer to this question is yet another reason that the definition of the elective process cannot be included in the constitution itself. The answer is, I have absolutely no clue. The answer to this question requires knowledge of the population and distribution of metaverse players among empires large and small as well as unaligned players. For all I know the bulk of representatives should come from small empires or unaligned players. I suspect that at least half of a truly representative metaverse council should probably consist of representatives of this group. The only true way to tell what groups of players should get how much representation is with a census. We currently have no way to take such a census. Our best possibility is the AltMeta, but even that needs change to have even the chance of accomplishing a true census. Currently the AltMeta data only includes players that are in the top 50 empires, no unaligned players, no small empires. So we’re in a situation that we need a council to make changes to the AltMeta so we can figure out how to elect representatives to the council.
So the bottom line of all these words (there must be over a thousand in this post alone, for extra credit someone could count them, perhaps TGE, he seems to have an excessive amount of energy
) is the following suggested replacement sentence for the last sentence of the constitution.
“A priority of the council is to take a census of all metaverse players and determine an elective process that is representative of *all* metaverse players.”My God, all this for one sentence. And this is presumably keeping it simple.
So here’s the quiz. Should I make this replacement, or should I just let sleeping dogs lie?
