(07-21-2021, 05:11 PM)Luca Wrote: The structure of this process will need to be addressed if these are cut completely, because our current system does not allow for lower-level staff to start these conversations on their own. I'm not sure your post addresses an alternate system, since your suggestion is still to use the same voting process in the RMB. At the moment, that is where the current system is broken and grinding the rest of the department to a halt.

Vote opening could be done with a dispatch pinging subscribers instead (like the Assembly usually does) and recommendation dispatches could also ping subscribers directly. In theory, when we do a complete revamp of the system, we could also unite that voting and the recommendation dispatch into a single thing - when opening the final vote, it could as I suggested list the main points brought up in a discussion (that of course assumes that a discussion is held before the vote is opened - alternatively those could be dynamically added as the vote and discussion progress), and then when we publish the recommendation the actual analysis could be appended so we have one easily viewable documentation of the thoughts of TSPers and how they led to the voting recommendation and the analysis.

The opening and closing as well as collecting opinions are the tasks that currently take up most of the time, and if we can (semi-)automate (of course all those would have to function with at least some sort of a human trigger) them via the API, concurrently open them up to a bigger pool of people, and stretch things like opinion gathering out a bit by having those pro-con points dynamically added as we progress, I believe this would immensely reduce the workload staff members have to actively do, in favor of having more emphasis on the discussion itself.

(07-21-2021, 05:11 PM)Luca Wrote: I do not believe that the RMB environment for voting is workable in terms of getting activity and discussion out of gameside-only players. There is hardly any evidence of this ever happening in the history of the voting region, and most of the times it has was when a foreign author arrived in the RMB to argue with us about our takes. I'm leery of relying on RMB discussion for regions like TSP. It's something that Refugia does decently, but there is a much higher number of interested WA people by percent there.

I'm especially leery of separating the voting location from the debate location because it guides us back into the same predicament we are in where we separate our activity from the vote and lose the activity completely.

I suppose we could also make a split system where people could vote both via Discord and via the RMB so people can use whichever they like best. I just believe that we should at least give gamesiders the option to involve themselves in the WA recommendation process because it's mainly a gameside function with primarily gameside effects, and I don't think that using the RMB as a place to drop your ballot is what's having everything grind to a halt - the problem that we need an active senior staff member for the manual opening is, and when we can simplify that as I suggested above, that problem would be gone.

Regarding activity and discussion on the gameside, I really have no idea what other options we have. If we use the RMB as an optional location for players to cast a vote, possibly even with a comment (which we then could include in the discussion & voting dispatch concept I described above), that's an easy way for everyone who's remotely interested but doesn't have Discord to take part in the process, gather a bit of insight into it, and then possibly decide to get involved further, whether as a staff member or by joining Discord and the discussion there.

(07-21-2021, 05:11 PM)Luca Wrote: That is to say, let's arbitrarily say that people are supposed to discuss things in the Discord server and vote on them in the RMB, right now. How is that different from what they're supposed to do alreay? How would you telegraph that there has even been a change, how would you support actually initiating that change in terms of player activity? There's just no easy what to move the status quo when no one needs to do anything differently than what they're doing now.

There are discussions on proposals in the #world-assembly channel already from time to time - although admittedly relatively rare, usually whenever someone brought up a point from the RMB or the NS forums or wherever, it sparked at least a small discourse on the subject. Of course I can't say whether that were just coincidences, but I think that if we move discussion to Discord, with an already more discussion-friendly environment, the new thread feature, and an engaging opener (which could for example include - besides the basic info like we include on the RMB already - a few discussion-starter questions derived from the proposal's arguments/general content, which OWL staff formulate before opening the discussion) we could generally have more discussion on proposals.

I know that technically, if we have voting both on Discord and the RMB, nobody needs to do anything differently, but it'd be much more comfortable for at least the Discord users if they do. The RMB of course would likely continue to not be the pinnacle of activity, but that role should deliberately be resting with Discord in this scenario - as I said, I think the RMB should remain simply as a possibility for gameside-only players to continue to have a say in what OWL recommends.