(04-08-2020, 08:18 PM)Rabbitz Wrote: I agree with Islands here. We're all doomed. In addition, the OWL server appears to be made only of people who are interested, and have those experienced being the only ones active. OWL lacks any formal instruction on what the basics of writing WA proposals are, what makes a proposal a good proposal, how to write one, and advice on giving your vote.

Yeah this is one area we really need to work on. I think Agalaesia was going to get a basic WA guide set up, but that hasn't come along so far. Writing info for all those things you mentioned is definitely on the to-do list, though I suspect it's the piece we'll take longest to complete (guide writing just isn't that fun...).
 

(04-08-2020, 08:10 PM)islands_of_unity Wrote: It should be on the main discord area to grow interest and insight into its existence, goals, and operations.

I do see where you're coming from. I agree with what you want to accomplish by moving OWL to the main discord. There are two reasons why I think that's not what we want, though:

1. TSP is generally quite resistant to adding lots of new channels. If we were to have the entirety of OWL operate on the server, it would probably only get one channel, maybe two. Since the OWL server right now has seven distinct channels, compressing it like that would only make things hectic and restrict its growth. None of the ministries operate out of their single main-server channel, and if we want the Office to be as important as a ministry, we shouldn't make it operate there too.

2. As far as simply voting on the main server goes -- The thing is, I don't think the goal of OWL voting is purely to get as many responses as possible. We already do that by looking at the in-game regional vote, and the delegate will always switch his/her in-game vote to that regional vote before the end of the in-game voting period. The in-game regional vote already includes everybody, so we don't really need another mechanism to try to loosely approximate including everybody by making OWL votes as quick and easy as possible. Instead, what we need is a mechanism for gathering specifically the subset of all those opinions which are substantive and well-formed. We want the OWL votes to not only be about voting, but also be about sharing opinions and thoughts. OWL voting should be more than just clicking "yes" or "no", because we already get that information. Moving only the voting piece of OWL to the main server just disconnects it from the discussion piece of OWL.

Instead I suggest we focus on making the system as it stands clearer, while making minor tweaks as necessary. Because OWL has been rapidly evolving and morphing in structure as we go along -- and especially because Agalaesia and I sometimes have substantially different conceptions of things that then need to be reconciled -- we admittedly haven't been too clear about what the processes of the Office actually, officially, are. I think laying out how things will actually work, with specifics, in an ideal Office is a good place to start.

So here's a diagram I created that lays out the model for how a proposal should move through OWL. When we eventually get guides written I think an important one will basically be explaining this -- what the trajectory looks like.