The AI is definitely interested and supportive of this initiative. I believe it was actually Hidar of our happy little band that first questioned if there was anybody out there so I would hope that we could be considered among the charter members. This dialogue appears to be happening simultaneously here in the forums and in the Core.

Marshall, both of your points are excellent. I think we pretty much decided to eschew unaligned representatives in the initial formation of the council basically for logistical reasons. However, I would definitely be supportive of getting representation for the unaligned players ASAP.

Actually, there is some possibility of allowing mods in the AltMeta. However I'm not sure how attractive an option it is. As the AltMeta is currently constructed the cheat flag is ignored. I think this is a concern that should be dealt with but for now anyway you could submit a modded game to the metaverse, get a cheat flag on the "real" metaverse that would be ignored on the AltMeta listings and be recorded normally.

But I think it's a big concern that graphical only mods cause the cheat flag. To truly address this would require changes in the "real" metaverse. I feel that these should be put off until the time the metaverse council has proven the ability to increase interest in the metaverse *and* that it has the unified support of the bulk of metaverse players. Without having proven both of these things, there's little motivation for Stardock to try and accommodate our requests.

The only kind of request of Stardock that I would consider early on would be a couple of new achievement medals. I think a medal for completing games of all the galaxy sizes and another for completing games of all different victory conditions. We should also come up with clever names for these medals, but at the moment I can't think of anything good.

(BTW Woot Patriots)

1) Any emperor of an empire with at least (arbitrarily chosen round figure) ten members can can join. That emperor (or his chosen representative) get one equal vote to all others.

2) The council decides everything about the council.

Simple really

Edit: 3) In the event of a tied vote the council's presented / spokes person / elected leader can cast the deciding vote.

The council itself will decided when leadership votes are made, for now who ever can be bothered to set it up gets to be the leader.

Excelent points, glad to see this thread active already.

One addition, these basic rules will be inturpreted by the Council, that means these rules wont be set in stone, they would just provide limitations.
As for requirements. I agree with the first point Squibit made, that should be the basic requirements. Requirement two would be a certain amount of games submited a month(at least before membership is approved) to insure activity. If game numbers are disagreed upon, then number of actual active members in the community.
As for starting on equal footing, i dont agree. In my opinion, they would be offered 1 rep for the first two weeks, untill we are sure that they are active and truely want to improve the meta(we dont want to waste seats).

As for voting, a agree to the 70% margin of requirement to pass. And the leaders(if any) should only act as a positive moderating force, making sure things dont de-evolve into a conflict, and a possible interference to the Council. And these leaders will also decide that in the event a topic can not be resolved within the council, then wheter it is worth presenting it to a public poll.

What do you think about this opening clause(Warning: might sound like the Declaration)

We, the active members of the Metaverse, have generally agreed and approved of the Formation of the Council for Metaversial Improvement. This Council will be granted responsibility and right to vote upon and debate plans and options for a better Metaverse. Other responsibilites would be community involvement, and future plans to widen the player base. The Representatives will be held by the rules stated bellow, and those rules will stay entact unless disagreed upon and submited to vote. This document will only have worth as long as each member group(Empire) udersigned agress that it is functioning properly and is not missusing whatever power it might have. The following rules must be agreed upon by an 80% popular vote in the thread of origin(this thread).

Council for Metaversial Improvement

How about 'Council for Improvement of the Metaverse'?

not missusing whatever power it might have

I just have to point out the small irony of this phrase coming from the Lord of the Sith... We've seen the movies - we know what your avatar did the last time he was part of a council!

All kidding aside, Emperor, thank you for starting this thread and keeping the discussion rolling.

Requirement two would be a certain amount of games submited a month

Not sure I like this idea. We all know that all games are not created equal. Some games will only take a couple hours to post whereas others could take weeks. Also, some people only post 1 or 2 games a month due to life issues. How are you going to classify an Empire as being active or not? Some Empires have 60 or 70 members, others only have 5 or 10.

Maybe by a reasonable amount of points submitted by an Empire per month?

I don't know. Just thought I would voice my opinion on this.

How about 'Council for Improvement of the Metaverse'

Quixotic again?

We're going to be saying and writing this over and over again, how about we just call it the council?

A suggestion from a non-empored metaverser (okay 4 games...)

Since the debate has already descended into ( a rather polite) wrangling of words about purpose, naming etc

Why not have a representative of each of your 4 founding empires each draft a version of the constitution. Once posted, the various strengths of each document can be included in the first provisional draft, and items that are irreconcileable (sp?) can be discussed and voted upon by said committee. Find an external source for tie-breaking votes... a Dev or Forum Poll.

Further my (unrelated) two bits on ratification: If your real duty is to the metaverse players, I'd suggest leaving ratification to them: Open a thread, post the constitution (with an explanatory preamble) and allow anyone to vote (including an explanation so if it fails you can draw on those to redraft it), so long as they have atleast one metaverse game logged. Votes would be tabulated by atleast three individuals (for legitimacy), with the votes cast after a specified time discarded.

Sure, you will be exposig yourselves to the whims and logic of the average fool, but isn't that what democracy is all about?

Let me conclude with a question: As a veteran player that only recently started posting 'verse games, what can your organization offer me?

Props to Mumblefratz btw...you changed how I developed my worlds.

I think that the first idea of a council of a few embers is the best way to start the whole idea. Take it as a temporary strategy to see if there are enough players supporting it.
This gives the time to work out what aims, rules and whatever precisly - considering all the different ideas listed in all threads. If the idea succeeds then you can think about scaling up with a larger number.
If you start with dozends of different ideas of what the council is to be then already the first vote about the needed approval for a vote will fail.

Let me conclude with a question: As a veteran player that only recently started posting 'verse games, what can your organization offer me?

I guess it depends on the kinds of games you post. If what you like to play is gigantic military victories, the answer is not much, at least directly. If you prefer some other size or victory condition, I guess the first thing is that we intend to provide brackets so that you can compete against folks who play similar scoring games.

The other potential long term benefit is that you will be part of a group of folks who share a common interest in posting metaverse games. The presumption is that the common interest of (hopefully) large group of folks will be better received by Stardock than the opinion of a scattered bunch of individuals.

I’m not sure where the idea of only having a limited number of seats came from? Why not have the number of representatives arbitrary.

Eventually, the number of seats will be arbitrary, however the idea of limiting the numbers is more from the point of view of limiting the possible discussions. Sure votes are easy to scale with numbers, but differing points of view and just the number of folks required to get together gets unwieldy very fast. On a similar note the house of representatives could have 10,000 representatives, or why not 20,000? Or why have a representative form of government at all, why not have everything in the country come down to a popular vote of every citizen? You have to admit that this gets pretty ridiculous pretty quick.

Also, why do member empires have to be active?

Same reasoning as the above. If you look at some of the threads that have been discussing these issues you see how difficult it is to get anything done in an open forum. It’s certainly easy to bitch and moan about things, but it’s not so easy to seriously discuss some issue that has importance to you and actually get something constructive done about it. People are constant sniping, or flaming, or hijacking the thread with the most harebrained of ideas. The more people involved the bigger this problem is. I defy you to find a single thread on this forum that has actually changed something ever.

“Should our logo be red or blue”, and there is a 60-40 split on the vote.

I guess there are some votes that will be like this and we should account for the case where there is no status quo to begin with, but really most votes can be worded to keep something the same or change it. In your example the implication is that we currently don’t have a logo and we’d like to have one. Therefore I would still suggest that the vote to have a logo require a higher percentage. Then perhaps the vote over a red or blue one should be a simple majority.

The secondary problem is that those who get to phrase the question can artificially effect the outcome

I agree that this has an effect in public opinion polls, but I think it has a far less effect within the context of a limited group of hopefully reasonably intelligent folks. In Massachusetts the ballot questions used to be worded in funky ways just for this purpose, but now all ballot questions must be phrased in such a way that a No vote means there will be no new law and a Yes vote means a change in a current law. AFAIK there’s never been a question that couldn’t be worded this way. So I still think that requiring 70% for any “change” is a good rule. If there truly is no “status quo” on a particular question then I agree the vote needs to be a simple majority.

I still would let the council decide the criteria for future empires to join. I see no need for this to be specified by constitution.

At beginning I was thinking about an election of few people between all the active players, but now I think that this way looks much better.
A question: Why 4 empires and not 3 or 5? I'm just curious!
Good job Mumblefranz  

Why 4 empires and not 3 or 5? I'm just curious!

Because that's all that seem to be alive at the moment. AFAIK you’re the first member of The Galactic Empire that we’ve heard from. From the AltMeta data it doesn’t appear that there’s been much recent activity from The Galactic Empire.

I’m not sure that you even have two active members left to provide the two reps that an empire would get. I am sure that if you are a continuing empire you will certainly be welcomed to participate, but at this point I’d think we’d need to see that you have at least a handful of active members to be considered a “founding” empire.

There are probably a bunch of other empires out there that have a few members. That plus the unaligned metaverse players may very well outnumber the metaverse players that are represented by what I've called the four founding empires. That doesn't mean they are any less important, it's just that these folks are far more difficult to contact and to determine their voting preference. It's partially a problem of validating who is and who isn't a metaverse player.

The ability to take a reliable census of “active” metaverse players is one of the first problems I’d like to try and address in the AltMeta. If you’re trying to represent a group of folks you certainly need to know how many such folks you have and where these folks are. There’s no real chance of being truly representative without that kind of knowledge.