(02-07-2018, 05:29 AM)Seraph Wrote: Both your campaign and Farengeto's have a strong focus on improving cabinet communication and transparency, both internally and externally, and rightly so. There were a number of occasions during the last term where I was unaware of important decisions being made in other ministries, at least one of which I was the *only* cabinet member not to know about and in a couple of cases I only found out about them at the same time as the Assembly/rest of the region. How would you go about ensuring this doesn't happen in the future?

This is an excellent question.

Now, the classical approach here would be for me to sit in my ivory tower, firing volleys of "transparency" and "accountability", while my opponent in response similarly sits in his ivory tower doing the same, and we both try to hit the perfect word-count for the keywords that the electorate likes most. I'm not going to do that. Instead, let me demonstrate how my thought process on this was (past tense) and what I am already doing (present tense) to fix it.

First, we need to identify the root cause, which in this case is simple. Your feeling of being left out came from FA decisions. Escade, Tim, and myself are all on the FA team. Therefore, there were cases where we already inadvertently had some of the discussion that would have swapped into the Cabinet proper if this were not the case, and we didn't follow the proper procedure. Particularly with the January Accords, what happened is that Tim just simply forgot that formal Cabinet approval is needed and submitted it to the Assembly before we did that. I reminded him about that and he immediately and apologetically reached out to you about it, but the damage was done.

Second, is this a one-off problem or something that can happen again? That Tim simply forgot about the Cabinet approval requirement is something that he, or anyone from the FA team, will forget again, plus I'll be likely mentioning it whenever it comes up again. So this particular situation can be considered a one-off. The principle of the matter, however, is systemic. Having three of four ministers in the same team producing work that requires Cabinet sign-off - it should be intuitively clear that this can easily happen again, despite best intentions. We are lazy by nature. So we can't just stop the process here, and have to keep going.

Third, what are the possible strategies to work against this? The obvious one is to not allow Ministers other than the MoFA to be in the FA team. This may hurt more than it helps, though, as all three of us are on the FA team for a reason. Tim is the MoFA, so obviously he must be on there. Escade is the FA team's cultural expert, so she should be on there. As for myself, I am there both ex officio to observe, but also as a regular Legislator, invited into the Team by Escade and explicitly kept by Tim because they want my input on things. A restriction on the FA team would hurt it more than it helps the Cabinet.

But more generally, let's recognize that this is a problem that can occur not just with the FA team, but also with the RA's Advisory Council or SPSF's General Corps. While FA and RA have minister-appointed teams, in SPSF the situation is even more complicated by virtue of the General Corps being Assembly-approved. So, the approach to limit minister involvement in other ministries in this way is too hairy and therefore a non-starter.

Therefore, we need another solution. I'm generally a big fan of eschewing huge decrees to force processes in favor of subtly nudging set pieces into place such that the change happens organically. With regards to Tim simply forgetting the requirement, Nakari is currently working on a law index sorted by topic, so that each Minister can quickly review the relevant laws that applies to them. That will help work against that problem.

To solve the systemic issue, we can consider what would force such an "inadvertent 3/4 Cabinet" to involve the full Cabinet as needed. This actually ties in with another open problem, which is that our documentation requirements are quite limited and incomplete. What we can do is force us to document what we are doing better, not just in the Cabinet proper but also in the ministries (which is fully lacking at this time). By just having documented things, the missing Cabinet minister will get a concise but complete briefing of the matter at hand automatically.

And so, I have written a draft for a new version of the Sunshine Act that introduces these documentation requirements. It's currently under review for my fellow comrades in the SPP, but you have seen it before - it contains an entire article with three substantive sections about documentation requirements, and I hope we can bring it to the assembly for discussion soon.

This is very likely not the answer you expected, but I hope it satisfies much better than the usual ivory tower approach would have. Thank you again for that wonderful question.

EDIT: Whew, the answer to this question is longer than the campaign itself!