What is your opinion on the Statute of Limitations issue?

1. What was the greatest challenge of your tenure as Chair of Assembly?
2. There have been some issues about voting periods, and confusion about when votes occur. What improvements would you make so that it was simple and easy for citizens to track what proposal was being brought up for vote and where?

Hopolis Wrote:How is that different from our judicial review proposal that was heavily criticised?!?!

The proposal that was given said that a judicial review could strike an executive decision if it was found "contrary to the Charter or the Code of Laws;" Awe's more recent proposal has just said "contrary to the Bill of Rights;" I would argue both of these are too big of scope and we need to parse it down a bit:

"An executive decision may be reversed if the decision was made unlawfully and inconsistent with the relevant provisions and procedure of the law."

My reasoning here is, as I said, saying "all of the Charter or the Code of Laws" is too wide, and gives too much latitude and Awe's "BoR" draws the focus away from the actual relevant clauses. I think there may have been some confusion as to why and what I was criticizing with your draft; if so, I apologize. 

Glen-Rhodes Wrote:Recently some people got confused about what they were voting on with the Elections Act. What do you think happened there, and how do you propose we prevent that kind of confusion in the future?

Escade Wrote:2. There have been some issues about voting periods, and confusion about when votes occur. What improvements would you make so that it was simple and easy for citizens to track what proposal was being brought up for vote and where?

I'm just going to conflate these two questions if you don't mind.

I think there are a few issues here:
- Knowing what one is voting on.
- Knowing when voting occurs.

I've already brought up the idea of returning to using bolded and striked markup up in the final voting stage to help relieve issues with voter confusion. I think questions of when voting occurs are a bit more difficult to challenge; one solution would be to harmonise voting periods so that both constitutional and general legal changes are either a three or five day decision (assuming that using both is confusing) and another idea would be as was suggested by a few Americans to start votes on only Fridays, so that voting is done across weekends - this would, presumably, increase voter participation, procedural consistency and practice - in addition to reducing the issues with "race-to-the-queue" mentalities. 

Darkstrait Wrote:What is your opinion on the Statute of Limitations issue?

I think it's necessary. We need a better legal understanding of when that line is drawn between 'too old' and 'not too old,' because otherwise we're bound to see inconsistencies start popping up in court cases and inconsistencies can start chipping away at the court's legitimacy and the confidence of others in the courts. Another pressing factor with regards to the statute of limitations is that a number of incidents of regional vulnerability are getting old basically; Sedgistan was four years ago, Frak was four years ago and even the Milograd coup and all of the people associated with it, was two years ago. 

I kind of like the Europeian Statue of Limitations that was suggested by Sopo, but I think it'll need to be modify to fit TSP context; we're in the middle of strengthening our courts and that might mean that we may want to try people who had gone untried previously for things like blackmail and corruption which were grey areas in our law previously. 

Quote:What was the greatest challenge of your tenure as Chair of Assembly?

Managing the Great Council when passions ran high was a real challenge but we got through it and I think The South Pacific is better for it. Along the way as Chair you start to learn new skills of how to mediate discussions and probe it when discussions hit a standstill. Eventually it became clear at one point to me that we would have to extend the Great Council's discussions for more time to discuss. 

When I was Chair I kept a thread updated which listed all proposals at vote with a very brief explanation of what was being voted on. Would you be opposed to starting something like this again? Maybe even with more detail on top of reintroducing the coloring in the voting stage.

Quote:Considering you were a strong proponent of further integration with the onsite community, what steps would you take to make the Chair of the Assembly and the Assembly itself better known to the region at large?

My hope would be that the Chair could work in conjunction with the Local Council - building legislative updates on the day-to-day activities of the Assembly.

Quote:When I was Chair I kept a thread updated which listed all proposals at vote with a very brief explanation of what was being voted on. Would you be opposed to starting something like this again? Maybe even with more detail on top of reintroducing the coloring in the voting stage.

Admittedly, I do wonder if that's kind of redundant, because if you're not following the Voting Centre regularly, why would you follow changes to a sticky? Nonetheless, certainly something like that could raise more awareness of votes taking place and I'd be willing to give it a trial run and if I got the impression it was helpful to people, I'd stick with it certainly.

Considering that the Chair of Assembly is both a powerful position and one that requires knowledge of legislative writing, many people are intimidated to apply, what might you undertake this term to encourage new people or those less-experienced to learn about the duties of the CoA?

What qualities or strength do you opponents in this election have that you would want to emulate?

If one of your opponents were to win this election, would you be willing to support and guide them?

Quote:Considering that the Chair of Assembly is both a powerful position and one that requires knowledge of legislative writing, many people are intimidated to apply, what might you undertake this term to encourage new people or those less-experienced to learn about the duties of the CoA?

I was thinking I'd probably need a new Vice Chair of the Assembly, for starters - and given it'd definitely be my final term as CoA, I would be taking extra care in ensuring several players were ready to take on the duties of CoA before I left office.

Admittedly, there are some things about CoA that you can't learn easily; how to handle debates that have gone off the rails is a life-long learning process that you only approach on the job...in the moment.... in person. And every debate is a little bit different - I can't tell you a universal way about how to approach a discussion, because there isn't one. That's stuff you learn with experience.

Quote:What qualities or strength do you opponents in this election have that you would want to emulate?

Haha, well their popularity would be nice. *sniggers* I think Farg has this beautiful sense of right and wrong and sticks to his convictions and Aram has this burning passion in him for change that isn't belayed by things here or there, and I honestly see a lot of them in me. To answer your third question, it'd be an honour to lose to either of these guys. I didn't run for office because I thought I'd win necessarily, but because I know I'd do an excellent job, and I want to serve as Chair and I think I've got work to finish.

You know, when I defended more regularly, I'd often lose - like in general, I'd say 5% of my attempted liberations were successful. I'd consider that to be one of the greatest things I learnt as a defender: how to not be afraid of losing and how to keep on fighting for what you believed. If I were to lose, it'd be a bittersweet handshake with a player that I'm certain I could trust to do a good job. Thanks for your questions, Escade.