Ideas for a Constitution

I have two preliminary ideas to add here.

It looks like we're going to start out by chartering representatives from four or five of the top empires. I haven't seen much input from the other empires or non-aligned players, but I have hope that we have at least generated some interest in those groups.

My first proposal is this: Once the founding empires have voted and the initial congress has been formed, we create another two at-large council seats for those groups. These could be filled by a council vote once a pool of interested players has formed. We could add more, if desired, as time goes on.

My second proposal could be the result of a day spent inhaling paint fumes, but I'll put it out here anyway. (My avatar made me do it.) Part of the purpose of this body, as I understand it, is to generate interest in the Metaverse and bring in new players. One group of players that has been completely shut out of the Metaverse thus far is the modders (and people who play mods).

I know that you can't start a new Metaverse game if you have mods turned on in your options screen. Would it be worth forming a study group to figure out A) if there is some way to get around that restriction; could those scores be displayed in a separate column in the AltMeta (I assume they would still trigger a cheat flag); and C) would anybody think it's worth the trouble?

Other than that, I hope people will post here every so often to keep this near the top.

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.

Thank you for your imput vukasika and marshall.

Marshall i have already though about the modders and their possibility to be represented. I dont think there is a way to get around it currently, since it would require changing the game, and we dont want to ask Stardock that yet. But, it will be considered once we gain more members, and build interest. As Mumble has already said if we agree on one thing and there are many of us we will not be ignored. The modders will be represented if they want to be so, they are still members of the community and they have a right to.

I have spread word to all the major empires we wanted to target, hopefully they will post.

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)

As far as a minor contribution to the intent of this thread I think all metaverse council votes should require a minimum of 70% for the approval of any change to the status quo.

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.

In the event of a tied vote

If we decide on a 70% minumum approval rate (or some other number) as Mumble suggests, I think that makes a tie vote a failure.

I would have no problem with incorporating additional empires on an even footing if they contact the council and express a desire to participate and contribute. For the sake of future endeavors, I think we will need to demonstrate a broad base of support from the Metaverse community - the broader, the better.

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).

Then i think the rest should be divided into three subcluases. One for Representaion, the other for Membership, and the last for Leaders and Voting.

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.

Me a plot for takeover... NO!! Of course not. I love Democracy. I love the er... Metaverse.   

And you welcome, yea i dont know well come up with a name, but Metaverse and Improvemnt definetly have to be in there.

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.

I have to admit that I'm quite attracted to the simplicity of Squibit's suggestions; however I do think we need a little more than that.
TheGreatEmperor's preamble starts out pretty good but I'm not so sure about the last two sentences.

This document will only have worth as long as each member group (Empire) undersigned agrees that it is functioning properly and is not misusing whatever power it might have.

The concept that a single founding empire's lack of support in the council thereby invalidates the council is one I'm not totally sure about. On one hand the councils authority is essentially being granted by the group of metaverse players that's represented by the four founding empire's. On the other hand the reason for this is more one of logistics. I think the true constituency of the council is in reality all metaverse players. The empires are merely the best representation we have at the moment for all metaverse players. I agree that the founding empire's have a unique place, but I'm not sure they should have the unique authority that would allow a single one of them to dissolve the council. What about empire's that join in the future, what about significant groups of unaligned players? I think I could live with the sentence as stated but I just want to point out some concern.

This sentence basically describes the condition under which the council should be dissolved. In some sense I don't think such a sentence is needed at all. The condition under which the council should be dissolved is when it loses the support of its constituency. I don’t think we really need to get all complex about defining what constitutes losing support of it’s constituency because if and when that happens most folks will simply ignore the council, there will be no need to dissolve it because it will already be irrelevant.

Anyway, if with these caveats people still would like this sentence to be in, I suggest that it at least gets reworded to: This council will be dissolved when and if any of the four founding empires withdraws their support from the council.

The next sentence I don’t agree with at all.

The following rules must be agreed upon by an 80% popular vote in the thread of origin (this thread).

At this point the source of the legitimacy of the council is based on the agreement of the four founding empires. Therefore I believe that this document needs to be ratified by all four founding empires by whatever manner they chose (assumedly this would be the same manner they decided to approve of the council in the first place). So I would change the last sentence to: This document needs to be ratified by the four founding empires and thereafter may only be changed by agreement of at least 80% of the council.

Then I think the rest should be divided into three subclauses. One for Representation, the other for Membership, and the last for Leaders and Voting.

Not a bad idea of what to do next. At this point I’d like a little discussion on the first paragraph. Hopefully we can come to a strawman agreement on the first paragraph’s suitability before moving on to the next.

(That's not too bad. It only took me two pages to discuss two sentences).

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?

Not sure I like this idea.

I don't like this idea either and there's no reason to go into it at this point anyway. How new empires or unaligned reps get added in the future will be totally up to the council.

We have enough to discuss and agree upon without side distractions.

I'm also not sure we need to define leaders or whatever to differentiate members. Again if desired this can be decided in the future by the council itself.

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.

Number of reps would be readjusted as the population of the Metaverse increases

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).

Requirement two would be a certain amount of games submited a month(at least before membership is approved) to insure activity.

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. When another empire reaches the requirements (whatever they may be) they can join with one representative of their own. 37 members? No problem if over the required percentage vote for something that is what happens? 143? Same applies.

Also, why do member empires have to be active? If they are not active, they won’t vote, and therefore not have any impact on decisions made. No problem of wasted seats if you don’t specify a limited number of seats in the first place.

As for voting, I agree to the 70% margin of requirement to pass.

People are less likely to question decisions that have for example 80% approval. If we decide things based on a narrow margin, that's when people can wonder if we're really speaking for the metaverse as a whole or whether one faction that happens to be slightly more powerful is pushing something that a good percentage of folks don't want.

The other thing that can help ensure validity is a requirement for a high percentage of agreement to make any change.

I somewhat see the logic of these arguments, but, nah.
The main problem I have is most issues aren’t just yes or no answers.
Lets say the question is something like: “Should our logo be red or blue”, and there is a 60-40 split on the vote. What happens? No logo at all? That is crazy.

The secondary problem is that those who get to phrase the question can artificially effect the outcome. The question “Should time registered on the GalCiv2 forums be a deciding factor on new council member requirements?” can easily become “Should time registered on the GalCiv2 forums be irrelevant when deciding who becomes a member of the council”.
Depending on the view of those announcing the issue, they can determine the outcome, if the 80% or 70% majority is not reached.

Therefore I stand by my recommendation for majority votes to decide all issues.

- - - - -

We, the (X number of starting empires) emperor-approved representatives from the largest member empires of the Metaverse, have (Removed the word “generally”, unneeded I think, to be honest I don’t know what the diffrerence between “generally agreeing” and “agreeing” is?) 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 responsibilities would be community involvement, and future plans to widen the player base. The council will operate under the following terms until such a time that (in accordance to these terms) they are changed by the council itself. (Edited for simplicity):

1) Any empire made up of at least ten members may join the council by sending an email to [email protected] ([email protected]? )

2) All decisions of the council will be made with the majority approval of the council.

3) In the event of a tied vote, the council's (president/spokes person/elected leader) can cast the deciding vote.

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.

Good to see you in this thread Syrrus. Is there any consensus among Orca's for approval of the concept of a council yet? Will you be taking a vote? I haven't seen or heard from Thebestaintyou in awhile. If he's not available, then you certainly have the stature to represent the Orca's. We definitely need the support of the Orca's to have a chance of success.

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.

All right I'll try my hand at this as well. Here's what I would go with. I think this is pretty much complete as is. I think it is both necessary and sufficient. Sweet and simple. Comments please.

---

We, the active members of the Metaverse, as represented by the four founding empires: B.C. Space Orca’s, The Galactic Diplomats, The High Command Hegemony and Arrakis Imperium, have approved the formation of the Metaverse Council. The purpose of this Council is to increase interest and participation in the Metaverse by the general Galactic Civilization II community. To achieve the stated purpose the Council is presumed to act with the combined weight and authority of all those the Council represents. This document defines the rules under which the Council must act and requires ratification by all four founding empires. Once ratified these rules may only be changed by an 80% majority of the Council itself.

1) Any and all votes that require a change to the status quo require a 70% majority. In such a case where no status quo exists a simple majority is sufficient.

2) Initial representation shall consist of 2 representatives selected or elected from each of the four founding empires. The nature of the selection of future representatives and the inclusion of future empires in the Council shall be determined by the Council itself, but the inclusion of representatives unaligned to any empire is to be a priority.

---

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  

I'm pretty sure this will go political...

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.

I'm pretty sure this will go political...

It already has, it's inevitable. But that doesn't mean nothing good can come of it. It's also a reason to require a high percentage of agreement to authorize change. It really does depend on the integrity of those chosen to represent.