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Witchcraft and Sorcery · 08-22-2021, 11:42 AM

PRESS RELEASE

Assembly Discussion on OWL Reform

21 August 2021

Fellow South Pacificans,

Since early July, the Cabinet has been conducting a review of the Office of WA Legislation's (OWL) current structure and staffing following several issues with its operations. Initially, this review was prompted by the repeated failure of OWL to open votes on WA recommendations, thereby failing its core charge per Article 1(1) of the World Assembly Act in issuing World Assembly voting recommendations. To some extent, these issues were one of staffer attention, and a reshuffling of OWL Staff mitigated these issues. However, there were further concerns that the current bureaucratic structure of OWL's voting made the work burden on staffers opening and closing votes too high, while also decreasing the engagement of staffers and the general public in discussions, thereby making staffer engagement in the program structurally unsustainable. As a generalized observation, OWL voting discussions rarely resulted in substantive back-and-forth engagement, making it difficult to find South Pacifican opinions to quote in the current OWL recommendations, and hampering the ability of the region to develop its own autonomous WA judgement and soft power on WA issues.

This prompted further discussion about OWL procedure, including discussions of how to encourage further collaboration and/or discussion, decrease the excessively mechanized nature of OWL staffer work, and ensure OWL staffers are not overburdened. The Cabinet and OWL Director deliberated together at length, offering different suggestions and philosophies for WA engagement. Having already discussed these issues at length, we believe it is now time to open these discussions up more to the Assembly writ large. While the Cabinet has extensive thoughts on these matters, it is important to involve all the relevant stakeholders in the conversation before OWL ultimately decides on its own direction.

With that, the Prime Minister has declassified the thread "Discord discussion re OWL + talk more here" with several relevant Discord conversations related to OWL reform. The Cabinet invites discussion on the future of OWL, specifically as it relates to resolving the problems of staffer attention and activity and using OWL to increase TSP's broader WA discussion, engagement, and interregional soft power. While discussion has been ongoing for some time, the Cabinet would like to see discussion wrap up in the next month so that work on any relevant reforms can begin near the end of our term and be finalized in the upcoming term.

Faithfully yours,

The Cabinet

Witchcraft and Sorcery

Former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. Formerly many things in other regions. Defender. Ideologue. he/they.

(This post was last modified: 08-23-2021, 12:53 PM by Witchcraft and Sorcery.)