Universal Suffrage has Been Withdrawn!

Well, it took less than a month.

Taking a page from the book of the Athenians, the Stormwind Guards have decided that people need to earn their place in society before being allowed to vote.

You need to be 'friendly' with the guild now, which equates to a very large amount of questing at lower levels.
I suppose women, slaves and foreigners will follow shortly.

In guildchat there was some talk of wanting a more active guildmaster; but when I inquired to what such a more active guild master would actually be active doing, no serious answers followed... I still haven't been overthrown! Yay!

Democracy only has to go wrong once...

One power that belongs to the people in a real democracy is to give their power away to someone else.

Well, the first attempt came today:

A long-time member doesn't hold with all this modern thinking and opened a vote against it!

As can be seen in the sreenshot the votes were even 3 in favour to 1 against before I came in.
The creator of the vote didn't allow for the 7 day voting period we have, so I had to remove the vote from the calendar. The system remains untested for now, but I guess it's only a matter of time before someone tries again to undo all my hard work...

Voting in Effect

Everything is set up now.

There's a constitution document which is visible to the entire guild at http://tiny.cc/swcg It details all rules that are currently in place (nearly all through votes!). This is mostly how voting takes place (at least 10 votes, 2/3rds in favour, 7 days to vote), what ranks there are (there are 7 right now) and how bank tabs work.

Apparently the voting is being discussed in the raiders' ventrilo channel. There are already plans to overthrow me (which would lead to a contradiction in the constitution as the guild leader is not elected, but has to follow the will of the voters.. constitutional crisis!) and people coming up with the strangest things to vote on. Only talk so far though.

My former 'Captains' (one of them now a bureaucrat - still pending a vote) are mostly worried about things going wrong, which is understandable, but nevertheless I'd like it if they didn't bolt everything down just yet. One glaring loophole in the current rules is that everyone can invite new characters and there's no restriction on alts (alternate characters owned by the same player). The effect is that two people, or one person on two accounts, can invite any amount of alts he likes and dominate any vote. I'd hoped this would be solved by someone else, but Talina has already created a vote to patch it up, essentially by making it necessary for people to have 'friendly' reputation and to forbid havings alts. Problem there is that there's no way to see what character belongs to what player. I'll attempt to fight that vote in guildchat.

There's also a vote from the raiders though! The raidleader they voted into that position two weeks ago has run off to play another game and is barely online anymore. A new vote has been created to remove him from the position and there's a request for new raidleaders to step forward. The system in action.

The big worry in the guild seems to be people getting very random votes through the system in some way. I'm interested to see if this will happen considering the voting rules that are in place.
I personally still have some doubts on how to implement vaguely worded votes and if I should do something to make sure they are better defined by the players.


Signing out,
Commander Gaius,
Stormwind City Guard

Stormwind City Guard General Assembly

Today was the Stormwind City Guard's first General Assembly.

The Agenda:
The General Assembly - What is a General Assembly
Voting - How does voting work? How many votes are required for a vote to count; how long after a vote does it take effect?
Ranks - What ranks are there? What are their respective powers?
The Guild - Online or Offline?



The meeting started out with 10 people attending (14:21):

The above was explained by me, and the voting mechanism tried out on the calendar. The first votes were cast, on how to run the voting mechanism. A rivalling vote was immediately set up with different numbers by Talina.

I proposed a system based on 1 guildmaster and 1 rank, and put to a vote an extension of 1 further ranks and 2 punishment ranks.

Guild master has all powers but will only execute what the votes on the calendar say.
Constable can invite, create calendar events (votes) etc; can't kick or promote/demote others.

Proposal:
Bureaucrat can promote/demote people to the two punishment ranks to effectively counter problems arising in the guild.
Two punishment ranks - and -- which restrict bank access and chat access restrictively and can be 'accessed' by the bureaucrats.


At this point many people have gotten bored and left, which was actually expected. (14:41)

Some more votes were put up, on having a facebook page and having parties together.

All votes will be counted and put into effect one week from today.

I hypothesise that the current behaviour of little interest in the guild voting will persist for a while (we'll have to see what effect recruiting specifically on democratic appeal will do). Again hypothetically this will lead to many problems and questions of why we bother. The crucial question is what people will do from that point: continue to ignore existing problems, leave the guild or take responsibility and make the system actually work.


Obviously, I'm hoping for the latter