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Purple Hyacinth · 03-19-2021, 04:47 PM

The Southern Journal
The Official News Outlet of the South Pacific

Interview with Anjo

By Rabbitz

Note: Anjo is the Director of the Office of WA Legislation.

Explain why you think that OWL was not passed in the Assembly to become a Ministry.

Before I begin, as Deputy Chair, I've got a certain neutrality on Assembly matters to maintain, so I won't get too political Tounge

In the original debate on Jay's bill for creating a Ministry of WA Legislation, the most vocal people seemed to first be opposed because the Cabinet in their eyes already is too large, or on grounds of it only creating another position the Assembly won't find enough suitable people to fill and thus fall to inactivity, or due to it taking away more political power from the Delegate. As the debate progressed, it might also have been an issue that there wasn't a universal understanding of how OWL works or why, which I think also had its fair share as base of people's opposition.

But what's interesting in this matter, is that nonetheless during the first day of voting, the Ayes on Jay's bill clearly had the upper hand, with only few Nays. This changed when Glen proposed his alternative to converting OWL to a ministry ‒ making it a permanent executive office. Now that was the real game-changer, as people flipped their vote and the vote was consistently below the required 60% since. As this alternate option only removed primary points of criticism without introducing new ones, it's only logical that some legislators voting Aye would switch to Nay and none vice versa ‒ with the highly criticised bill on the one and this fresh bill addressing many of the original concerns, especially the Cabinet size and inactivity points, on the other hand.

So, in the end, I'd just say an alternative generally more appealing to both supporters and those opposing was proposed, which doomed an already controversial bill.

Do you think that OWL should be a proper Ministry, or should continue as a department?

Hm, that's a tough question. As OWL, since it first began fully operating in July of last year, has generally been able to do the thing it was created for ‒ holding preliminary regional discussions on new WA proposals and compiling IFVs on them ‒ you could say that it's fine as-is, and you don't need to change anything on that matter. However, I support both recent approaches insofar they're trying to finally codify OWL in regional law, because I think OWL has both proven to work well and its worth in amplifying our region's voice, and by that, the values we as a region stand for, at the table of the WA.
But, returning to the Ministry question, in the short term, I think a permanent executive office will be perfectly okay ‒ as Glen noted in his OP for the bill to that effect, OWL at the moment is primarily geared towards purely procedural issues, with no real need for own policy-making. Whether that'll change in the long term we'll see, because I remember that when OWL was created, another goal besides the regional voting procedure was to build South Pacifican WA authorship, and with our guide project finally well underway, I'm confident we'll see cool new developments from OWL.
Regional voting participation is at an all-time high, and we've got a promising body of talented OWL staff, new and old, actively involved in regularly producing quality OWL IFVs, so I'm definitely excited for what we'll be able to achieve with OWL in the future ‒ and maybe it'll warrant its own Ministry with expanded autonomy one day!

Could the skillset used to create OWL Bot be taught to other ministries to have something like it?

Well, for that I believe it's important to note that OWL, as mentioned before, to a great part relies on the exact same steps of the procedure being done in the exact same manner every time there's something to do (besides switching out information like proposal titles of course), so creating something to automate the more tedious parts of those tasks is a perfect fit for OWL ‒ that began with Somy programming the recommendation dashboard auto-formatter to make writing IFVs easier, and for now ended with the OWL Bot to semi-automate vote counting.
Now, while it'd definitely be possible to get other ministries custom helper bots ‒ I'm absolutely not the only one in our region who'd be able to use their glorious coding skills to further develop a ministry, just look at Viet ‒ I don't know whether it'd be as helpful to them as it was to OWL, with them not being that focused on a set procedure. I know Royaltica suggested the creation of an "event bot" in the October elections which was to help the Ministry of Culture in setting up event servers, but I don't remember if any details were presented about that. Something in that direction which I could imagine however would be ministries such as Media, which also has a focus on publication, using tools like Somy's recommendation dashboard auto-formatter in order to easily create visually appealing e.g. TSJ issues without much hassle. But who knows ‒ maybe someone has another cool idea and I or someone else too much time, and Coco and the OWL Bot might get a new companion ^_^