The first draft of the Senate set-up is up now !
Look in the Announcement forum for it..
But please keep in mind that it's a read-only thread.. it will be closed soon and any replies to that thread are deleted then.

THIS thread is your sounding board on the first draft...
Vent away..

I only have an objection to the first part of the third section: HOW DOES A MEETING WORK? The rest is questions or suggestions.

The system is good ... if this forum would not be a world-wide forum, but it is. You and I both come from Europe, so do a lot of others. We live in a different time zone. Others may also have a reason why they can not be on-line for a certain time.

If you vote for a certain time, there will allways be a few people who can not be on-line that time (that is why they voted another time). The good thing about this forum is that you can comunicate with people who sleep when you post, they can respond when you sleep ... It shouldn't be different for the Senate.

My suggestion would mean to rewrite the whole meeting part of your post because it requires another type of managing. My suggestion would be to vote for a day. The discussion will be open for 24 hours, giving eveyone time to be involved when they can be best. (you don't want someone who gives a quick, wothless input because he barely has time, would you?)

Another point is absence. Someone can be away for a week. You yourself have been away for more than half a week. When I am on vocation during such a meeting (I'm using myself for an example to avaid large sentace construcions), I am not in the position to post (also depending on where I am). So my suggestion is 1 or 2 reserve senators. Or else my voice doesn't count during that meeting and the chancelor would have to vote in my place if that is neccesery.

Also, what about clans. Will a clan vote for a senator (one vote for the whole clan) or will each member vote individually. In the last case, that could mean that one half votes for Senator a while the other half votes for senator b and c. What's the deal with this. I also think that if you work with clans that the clans and their member should be 'officially' listed on GB.com.

These are some toughts ... Do your best with it.

Ok, I read it and it seems good. I just have one complaint/question :)
Why are Senators nominated by MODs.? Does that kind of seem unfair? Your basically saying that to be a senator you have to be liked by the MOD's. Shouldn't the Senators be nominated by the people? :)

I'm not saying mods have to 'like' certain people; i'm saying with this that the mods (who oversee the kind of posting that takes place) can see who is really suited to contribute in a constructive way to a Senate.
After all, even if mods nominate a certain forummer, people can still vote him / her down.. so ultimately it's the forum's decision anyway..

Ok, but what happens if people like a certain person and the MOD's don't think he is good? Then there is no way for him to be nominated? Do you think that maybe we could at least have one person we nominate have a chance for the senate? Too me it seems a little one sided on who gets to be in the senate (no offense to anyone)

well, i guess if a person is backed by a sufficient amount of people (say 10 at least), he could get nominated. That way there's no 'ganging up' of few forummers to get someone into the Senate while the forum doesn't really agree. Only exception would be if the person brought forward by the forummers has a posting-problem. It's not about someone being popular; it's about someone fitting an official thing like a Senate.

To be "loved" by the mods, you have to post intelligent and constructive posts (getting redundant, heh?), which is one of the requirements to be senator anyway.

Don't worry, MODs aren't into favouritism; that's why we have the power :D

I agree with all of it, except one thing.

We can barely get more than 20 votes on interesting polls about the game. How many people that come here once a week are really going to care about the senate. they would feel more incliend to vote on a game-related poll, yet we still have a small number of votes. 50 seems like an unatainable count, and if you enforce that you may just end up with 0 senators instead of 6.

Yes... how are we going to get 50 votes on a poll... for one person no less! Maybe everone should be allowed to vote twice.

well, this shows why i wanted to wait until we'd hit the 200 mark anyway..
:D

It's all about promoting a vote.. I'll see if there's a system that can pm every forum member at once and encourage them to vote; that way, we're ensured lots of people get in on the action.

no, that on;y means that lot's of people know. They may not bother to vote on some "stupid election" that they don't care about. Just coz you tell people doesn't mean they will vote. Perhaps you should laower it to like 30 or 35. That would be more than fair. Plus, people that just vote coz you pm'ed them have no idea what the people are like. They would probably just vote, without knowing anything, and what does that accomplish.

I think that we should keep it open for a couple of days, allow all the "regulars" and anyone who comes to vote, then make a decision. You can send out pms, but if you get 50 people to vote, 30 of them won't know who they are voting for. You have to remember, alot of people sign up, post a question, and then never come back.

alright, in that case i'm lowering the amount to 30.
i'm editing the post as you probably read this for the first time..
:D
thanks for the input

Did you actually read m reply? (post no 3), cause haven't replied on it yet.

Sorry YD..

a meeting would be short anyway, since a lot of ground work would be typed separately beforehand anyway..

I'd say we could be finished in an hour. And an hour isn't so bad, even with time differences. I reckon i could go for saturdays at 23:00 my time, which is 16:00 US CST. That's very manageable.
Now we WILL get a problem if there a Nepalese Senator.. :D

Yes, saturadys would most likely work for everyone. I think that if we did it at like 12 or 1 o'clock eastern then it would work for almost everyone in the forum, much less just the senators.

I like it. So does the Senate (once it's in session) vote to exept it as their first act???

The one thing I wouldn't like is representing certain people and them only. It kind of takes a bit away...
I guess I'll get used to it though. Just have to get in the routine and It'll work for me. Leon you did much more work on this then I would have done if I was designing it. I might have had enough for one or maybe two pafes of documentation for it...WOW...

Also I must say that I didn't like deleting the polls afterwards. I guess you could make it where you have a discussion thread and a poll only thread. You can keep the poll only and keep the facts and a few points from the case for later reference. The discussion would be taken off. Thus conserving space.:D

good point. i'll probably go with that.

the actions to be made are now as follows:

first, a Senate forum should be formed with a password-protection.

second, Senators should be nominated

third, all polls would be handled (this would take about 2 weeks i gather)

fourth, the Senate convenes in a first session and goes over the rules / business at hand..

all in all, i reckon it will be working once i get back from my holiday october 11th.. :D

OCTUBER 11th !!!????:eek:
that long :(

well, if the forum is up this month, and all nominations / voting takes place in the two weeks after that, we can have the first meeting right before i'm on holiday on september 21st. that way you don't 'miss' a month.
i'll work on it..

I think this whole thing is a good idea. Lowering the number of people required with the voting is very good idea. I don't know if anyone noticed, but I've never posted on anything about the senate. This is because I just thought to look into the senate posts now. When I joined, you had that massive thread on the proposal for the senate, I looked at all the page's and thought "Forget it, it must be some running forum debate or rpg or something thats been going on for a while and all the regulars are in it...". So I didn't look into it.
Now, the point I'm getting to here is that I'm betting that a whole lot of the once-or-twice-a-week posters just think of this as some stupid game for all the guys that are on 24/7 or their thinking that "All the 'regulars' are involved with this, I guess I shouldn't butt in". It may sound weird, but I thought that, and I'll bet a lot of others are thinking that.
I'm saying that you should try to advertise your senate idea a little more. Make it more obvious that everyone, no matter who they are on the forum can get involved, and is welcome and encouraged to. I think your doing a good job of it so far, but since I'm coming from this group(I know there has to be at least a few more people that might feel like I used to) I thought I should make it known that some people might feel that way.
I'm not sure how you'd go about spreading the word about this senate, so I can't help you there, but it should be something that tells everyone to come and get involved. People that are new to forums, in general(like me, this is the first forum I've ever posted regularly at) probably have absolutely no clue whats going on, and seeing the word 'senate', well it might turn them off just because their thinking their new and might not know much. I know that is probably a very small minority, but this is going to need everyone it can get to vote, so perhaps you would want to try to encourge the quieter people to come out and get involved. I've used that phrase like 5 times, I know, but thats what its all about. Once they get involved they'll see that everyone's friends here and they'll keep being involved.

Ack.....another insanely long post by me. Hopefully I stayed on topic ;) Believe it or not, that would have been longer, but I gotta run....if I don't lose my train of thought when I get back, I'll try to explain what I'm thinking a little better. Thanks for putting up with my ranting guys ;) and if anyone actually understands what I mean, feel free to back me up

I just thought of another problem. If no one can reply to the voting, then after the first day or two the thread will be on the second page. I don't think voting bumps the thread, so how would we keep it on the top, posting "bumps" and nothing else? Why not allow people who voted to say so. That doesn't mean say who, but that way we can tell who has voted and how many "new" people are voting. Plus, it bumps the thread up.

Originally posted by Tie Guy
I just thought of another problem. If no one can reply to the voting, then after the first day or two the thread will be on the second page. I don't think voting bumps the thread, so how would we keep it on the top, posting "bumps" and nothing else? Why not allow people who voted to say so. That doesn't mean say who, but that way we can tell who has voted and how many "new" people are voting. Plus, it bumps the thread up.

Okay what we do is you vote then reply saying "I have voted" or you can even list you opinions, but you only get one chance in that area. You must not post twice in there you can only post your reasons in order to have a last minute conversion. It is like Senators in the old days (I'm not sure they do this now) would vote and then say a very short speech why they voted that way in hopes of converting people at the last minute jab. You may only post why you voted that way. You don't need to go so low as tring to undercut anyone or do any mudslinging (as in calling a specific person's Ideas crazy and then naming all the reasons why he is stupid too)

As a possible solution to the problem Tie brought up...maybe if no one could reply, maybe a mod could reply once every now and then just saying something like "Remember to vote", that wouldn't do a whole lot to increase voter turnout, but it'd keep the vote thread up at the top.

It figures that I can't think of something to do to address the problem I thought about...

Gamma731, all the others,

thanks a lot for those points... i'm with you on the 'advertising', Gamma. Maybe if people are pm'ing to newbies, they can promote the thread. We'll post some things that will encourage people to vote as well.

As for the voting; i'm leaning towards the 'Remember To Vote' post idea you had, Gamma. It solves the 'second page' problem and keeps us to voting instead of argueing about votes.

Once again, thanks for the input, people. We're getting somewhere with this..

The 200 members post is slowly turning into a clone of this thread, but I figured I'd try to ressurect this thread...
The senate draft states that everyone can pick which senator can represent them. This sounds like a good idea, but what happens when 1 popular senator gets an insane number of people to represent, while another gets maybe less then 5. I think you should cap the amount of people a senator can represent. Having a huge number of people to represent like that will just lead to a lot of work for that senator, and it will inevitablly lead to conflicting ideas for that senator to need to bring up in the senate.

Leon when will the Nominations START???!!!!:(

Nominations start once a password-protected forum is up.
I'm going through this with Chris once i'm back from a short business-trip; i'm flying out to the UK this weekend; will be back either Sunday night or monday..

Sooo...we can expect the nominations to start...Monday:)

No one agrees with the representing cap idea? I would have expected at least one person to agree.........oh well

Hold your horses ... I have something to say again.

Now that we're talking about advertising .. this is an ideal way to link the site and the Forums.

The Senate could as easily be a page on GB.com as a forum here. The forum will be used to discuss things, while the page is used to anounce things ...

That way it is easy to advertise. Updates from the senate will come on that page and will be reported in the GB.com news on the mainpage ...

*already thinks of spiffy design*

Just a tought ... no more

That is a really good idea! :) I like it!

However, my last post wasen't referring to the advertising