The biggest issue plaguing TSP right now is the cycle of ministers, where a minister gets elected, doesn't do anything, and resigns after a month because of school or exams. Stuff does happen, but if you know you have an exam in the middle of your term and that you won't be able to do anything for like a month, then... don't run.

I think this is a symptom of a bigger problem, which is that we ask/expect too much of our ministers, such that when they are elected many cannot combine the workload with IRL stuff that happens to us all. You only get a small number of people who even imagine they can keep up with the workload, and so run in the first place - and then some of them find they can't do it after all, and so resign.

To me - as someone who has never even contemplated getting involved in TSP government beyond the Assembly, as I don't have anything like the time that would be necessary for it - the solution lies somewhere in making government workloads more manageable, or else lowering our expectations. Whether that requires a Great Council to achieve, I'm not sure.

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such that when they are elected many cannot combine the workload with IRL stuff that happens to us all. You only get a small number of people who even imagine they can keep up with the workload

Unlike the legislative body (excluding The Chair), the executive body really does have a tomb of responsibilities attached to it.

Whether that requires a Great Council to achieve

I have a broad suggestion, inspired from real-life ministries. Allowing the Minister to form a plethora of subsidiary offices, responsible only to them, for the sake of a more efficient Ministry and not subject to elections from the legislature, is a place to start.
These subsidiary buddies can be structured to be temporary, tied only to the term of the Minister-appointee, so as not to have future Ministers have the need to keep if deemed unnecessary by the successor.

The Orange Records | Viliakmon (Pacifica) | NationStates Account Main | Discord: genericsequencealias#0990

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I have a broad suggestion, inspired from real-life ministries. Allowing the Minister to form a plethora of subsidiary offices, responsible only to them, for the sake of a more efficient Ministry and not subject to elections from the legislature, is a place to start.
These subsidiary buddies can be structured to be temporary, tied only to the term of the Minister-appointee, so as not to have future Ministers have the need to keep if deemed unnecessary by the successor.

There's nothing really stopping Ministers from doing this now legally. Although I will point out that ever-expanding bureaucracy is not really conducive to a successful Ministry.

Spoiler

Republic of Lansoon (Pacifica)

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I do partially agree with some of the complaints about a Great Council being a bit overkill, but from my point of view, our regular procedures are really unsuited for doing anything more than proposing minor or uncontroversial things. When you propose something to the assembly through normal procedures, you are relying on the proposal being so good or important that people will flock to help write it (which is exceedingly rare) or you need to show a fully prepared proposal. From there, amendments and changes do happen, but only to minorly change the proposal that is already at hand. Multiple proposals going up to vote only happen in rare circumstances, and only as an absolute last resort.

One of the major benefits of a great council, from my perspective, is that we don't pass by and perhaps offer a few words of advice to an already formed proposal, but instead we all agree to sit down to discuss ideas and what's wrong with our current system (if anything is wrong at all) before coming up with drafts together, sorting good drafts from bad, putting those together into proposals and then discussing the final details before going to vote. In normal procedures we only look at that last part, but for most major topics it is that other part that really matters - you can't jump straight to the proposal stage.

What happens when people do jump straight to the proposal stage with big topics is either everyone pokes holes at it until people give up on it and don't attempt to have another go (understandable, since the ideas behind the proposal were likely not discussed much beforehand before skipping straight to amount of effort it takes to make a proposal) or it incites a massive argument over the details (also understandable, since the fact that this wasn't discussed much beforehand leads to the ideas in the final proposal being already essentially set in stone before the discussion has happened - which leads discussions on the very basics of the proposal, which should have happened while the proposal was a mere bullet point draft, to become massive alternative proposals).

In other words, perhaps the problem is that our only options when it comes to fixing large issues is to try to make a complete proposal (which skips the actual drafting of the proposal and leads generally to rejection) or to wait until it becomes enough of an issue that it has to be fixed, leading to a MoRA split up scale argument or being bundled up with some other major issues at a Great Council.

Some food for thought: Perhaps it would be better to have regularly scheduled Common Councils, perhaps every year or every other, where the goal is not to rewrite every law we have but simply to look at all of our laws, discuss if there are things we don't like about them, and then propose drafts and then bills in the normal GC format. There would not be any mandate to change everything, but if we do as we did in the 2016 GC and vote on a number of identified problems whether or not we wish to work on them, there will be a mandate to productively use our time to work on a solution to those problems from the ground up. I do not want to get into the specifics of how that might work in this thread - if people really like the idea, I could make a thread, or it can be discussed at this GC (if the GC ends up happening). It is more of an interesting idea than anything.

What is important, however, is that currently our best way to get everyone together and discuss many large topics like this is the Great Council, and as such I believe that it is certainly worth giving a shot. I think the fear of the Great Council comes more from the fact that it's kept in wait until it's absolutely required than the actual mechanism itself - the actual mechanism itself is maybe a half month to a month where we discuss our laws and propose new ones, keeping everything the same until we decide at the end whether or not to change anything.

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I do partially agree with some of the complaints about a Great Council being a bit overkill, but from my point of view, our regular procedures are really unsuited for doing anything more than proposing minor or uncontroversial things. When you propose something to the assembly through normal procedures, you are relying on the proposal being so good or important that people will flock to help write it (which is exceedingly rare) or you need to show a fully prepared proposal. From there, amendments and changes do happen, but only to minorly change the proposal that is already at hand. Multiple proposals going up to vote only happen in rare circumstances, and only as an absolute last resort.

One of the major benefits of a great council, from my perspective, is that we don't pass by and perhaps offer a few words of advice to an already formed proposal, but instead we all agree to sit down to discuss ideas and what's wrong with our current system (if anything is wrong at all) before coming up with drafts together, sorting good drafts from bad, putting those together into proposals and then discussing the final details before going to vote. In normal procedures we only look at that last part, but for most major topics it is that other part that really matters - you can't jump straight to the proposal stage.

What happens when people do jump straight to the proposal stage with big topics is either everyone pokes holes at it until people give up on it and don't attempt to have another go (understandable, since the ideas behind the proposal were likely not discussed much beforehand before skipping straight to amount of effort it takes to make a proposal) or it incites a massive argument over the details (also understandable, since the fact that this wasn't discussed much beforehand leads to the ideas in the final proposal being already essentially set in stone before the discussion has happened - which leads discussions on the very basics of the proposal, which should have happened while the proposal was a mere bullet point draft, to become massive alternative proposals).

In other words, perhaps the problem is that our only options when it comes to fixing large issues is to try to make a complete proposal (which skips the actual drafting of the proposal and leads generally to rejection) or to wait until it becomes enough of an issue that it has to be fixed, leading to a MoRA split up scale argument or being bundled up with some other major issues at a Great Council.

Some food for thought: Perhaps it would be better to have regularly scheduled Common Councils, perhaps every year or every other, where the goal is not to rewrite every law we have but simply to look at all of our laws, discuss if there are things we don't like about them, and then propose drafts and then bills in the normal GC format. There would not be any mandate to change everything, but if we do as we did in the 2016 GC and vote on a number of identified problems whether or not we wish to work on them, there will be a mandate to productively use our time to work on a solution to those problems from the ground up. I do not want to get into the specifics of how that might work in this thread - if people really like the idea, I could make a thread, or it can be discussed at this GC (if the GC ends up happening). It is more of an interesting idea than anything.

What is important, however, is that currently our best way to get everyone together and discuss many large topics like this is the Great Council, and as such I believe that it is certainly worth giving a shot. I think the fear of the Great Council comes more from the fact that it's kept in wait until it's absolutely required than the actual mechanism itself - the actual mechanism itself is maybe a half month to a month where we discuss our laws and propose new ones, keeping everything the same until we decide at the end whether or not to change anything.

I'm confused here. So, because we can't get people to help draft laws in the general assembly, we want to force a GC ... to force people to help write legislation? Am I understanding this correctly?

I don't think having a regularly scheduled reworking of the law is a good thing by any stretch. But, I also think we could revamp large portion of the charter without an official GC. We just need space to discuss and draft.

-tsunamy
[forum admin]

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We just need space to discuss and draft.

Sort of like the space provided by a Great Council?

Spoiler

Republic of Lansoon (Pacifica)

(This post was last modified: 05-11-2022, 05:27 PM by Comfed.)

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We just need space to discuss and draft.

Sort of like the space provided by a Great Council?

The idea that we need to enact some different piece of legislation to call a "Great Council" is silly, just as the entire idea of GC is dumb. That's not just this Great Council proposal, that's every Great Council. I've consistently said this. If we want to draft and replace the entire Charter at one time, the Assembly *already* has the power and ability to do that imo. We don't need some enacting vote.

Edit: Actually, I'll go a step further. If we've put all this effort into discussing changes rather than arguing about whether or a GC is needed — with some arbitrary parameters — we'd be so much further along.

-tsunamy
[forum admin]

(This post was last modified: 05-11-2022, 07:46 PM by Tsunamy.)

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Not meant in disrespect, but if your main contribution to Assembly debate in the last several months is in this thread vehemently opposing a Great Council, I don't think it's really an opinion that should be heavily engaged. A Great Council, if done, would be explicitly about creating TSP for the active new generation, not the intermittently active (and inherently conservative) aging generation.

The demand to have a list of specific changes before even agreeing to hold a Great Council is unreasonable. Not all previous Great Councils had that. And even the few that did, like the one called for bicameralism, those ideas were quickly outshined by other unplanned proposals and the original main reason to hold them ultimately had very little support. 

I would not mind if a Great Council lasted for months, while people take their time to thoughtfully propose and debate new systems and laws. (Whether we'd keep the clause about pausing elections in that case would be up for debate. I don't really consider an authorizing resolution to be sacrosanct or require a supermajority to change.) If no changes are adopted, that's perfectly fine. It's not a waste of time if it got people thinking and more engaged in actually governing. We've treated TSP like an event-driven gaming group, instead of a political government simulation. It's already been said in this thread before, but I think if a Great Council is called, people will rise up to the task. If you don't think so, then you probably just lack imagination.

(This post was last modified: 05-11-2022, 07:57 PM by sandaoguo.)

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Not meant in disrespect, but if your main contribution to Assembly debate in the last several months is in this thread vehemently opposing a Great Council, I don't think it's really an opinion that should be heavily engaged. A Great Council, if done, would be explicitly about creating TSP for the active new generation, not the intermittently active (and inherently conservative) aging generation.

The demand to have a list of specific changes before even agreeing to hold a Great Council is unreasonable. Not all previous Great Councils had that. And even the few that did, like the one called for bicameralism, those ideas were quickly outshined by other unplanned proposals and the original main reason to hold them ultimately had very little support. 

I would not mind if a Great Council lasted for months, while people take their time to thoughtfully propose and debate new systems and laws. (Whether we'd keep the clause about pausing elections in that case would be up for debate. I don't really consider an authorizing resolution to be sacrosanct or require a supermajority to change.) If no changes are adopted, that's perfectly fine. It's not a waste of time if it got people thinking and more engaged in actually governing. We've treated TSP like an event-driven gaming group, instead of a political government simulation. It's already been said in this thread before, but I think if a Great Council is called, people will rise up to the task. If you don't think so, then you probably just lack imagination.

So ... I'm uncertain whether or not this is directed at me? If it is, I'll simply say I don't think treating a GC as a tentpole activity is ideal.

Otherwise, since this is being talked in circles, can I suggest the following change and to being this to a vote?
 

1. Mandates that participation in the Great Council be limited to those holding valid legislator status at Tue Apr 26 2022 22:59:59 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) the time this motion is brought to a vote and who continue to maintain legislator status throughout the duration of the Great Council.
   

(Edited for my lack of reading comprehension)

-tsunamy
[forum admin]

(This post was last modified: 05-12-2022, 03:35 PM by Tsunamy.)

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I don't think treating a GC as a tentpole activity is ideal.

I think this is a severe misinterpretation of what Glen and Jebediah have said. The idea isn't "oh, if we have a GC, that's good because it just makes something people care about". The idea is that if you consciously open the floodgates to every new idea and possibility, discussion and debate will emerge. A GC starts us out with a blank slate, which we desperately need given how much the government suffers under the weight of a system rooted in the early 2010s. It's not just or even primarily that we need to create an event. It's that we need to be able to start from scratch. 
 

can I suggest the following change and to being this to a vote?

This would remove the protection that the resolution contains. Anyone could have seen the GC resolution go up and then applied to be a Legislator in anticipation of it.

Minister of Foreign Affairs
General of the South Pacific Special Forces
Ambassador to Balder
Former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense

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