| [ASSEMBLY] Info Thread |
Welcome to the Assembly, the legislative body of the South Pacific. This thread is a compilation of information and guides about the Assembly. Have any questions or comments about this thread? Please post them in the Office of Assembly Affairs. Note: This is still a work-in-progress. What’s in This Thread?
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Table of Contents Introduction
Welcome to the Chair Guide! This is a comprehensive guide on everything you can or need to do as Chair. Of course, Chairs can always choose to do more than what is stated in this guide.
While this guide is primarily for (Deputy) Chairs to use, anyone can read it, and that's on purpose! Maybe you're thinking about running for Chair and want to know what being Chair entails, or you’re just curious about what Chairs do. Whatever your purpose is, I hope this is a helpful guide. If you're a Chair or a Deputy Chair, the section on votes and the section on States of the Assembly are really only for when you need to open votes or write a SoA. You may want to skim those two parts, but only really read them more closely when the time comes to actually do them. Not everything is required, and a number of things are just suggestions. Other things are traditionally done, and people will probably be expecting it of most Chairs. If in doubt, take a look at what previous Chairs did, or simply ask your fellow legislators for help ‒ somebody will be able to help you out. The parts on how to do things are simply suggestions, not requirements ‒ in fact, if you find a better way of doing things, you may want to add it to here yourself! If you have any suggestions on how to improve this guide or if you find an error in it somewhere, please feel free to contact the current Chair of the Assembly or @anjo. The Chair of the Assembly
The Chair is the Assembly's leader. As the ex officio moderator of the Assembly, they're responsible for maintaining decorum and a constructive atmosphere so legislation can be collectively refined to achieve the best result. They are tasked with ensuring that the Assembly functions smoothly, from votes to thread releases to Legislator Checks. This important role requires broad support from legislators, hence why the Chair is elected via Approval Voting, a system to elect a consensus candidate even if another candidate is supported by a simple majority they appeal exclusively to.
The Chair has their own private subforum, which they are free to use however they like. The password required to access it can be given to you by a previous Chair or a Forum Admin. Managing Votes
Mainly, the Chair is responsible to respond to motions (be it to vote, to waive restrictions, release information, …) in the Assembly in a timely fashion ‒ and while all what follows might intimidate you at first, with all the rules, exceptions, and small details to memorize, you'll start to get the hang of if you've (seen it be) done it a couple of times! This section will provide you with everything about the Assembly's procedure.
Types of Bills
Before you can open or close a vote, you need to determine the type of bill you're dealing with ‒ different mandatory debate/voting times and passage thresholds apply, all of which play important roles you need to consider. The Legislative Procedure Act and the Charter list the following properties (note that the time they are to remain at vote is equal to the debate time) for the different proposal types:
Currently, the Charter overrides the 50% majority needed for an appointment to the Council on Regional Security to be a 60% supermajority.
A special case is the Chair's discretionary editing power laid out in Article 2 of the Legislative Procedure Act. To save time on small corrections of the law, the Chair has the power to "correct typographical errors, grammatical errors, naming or formatting inconsistencies at any time, as long as these corrections do not alter the original intent of the law" without the need for a formal vote by the Assembly. However, before such edits are made, they have to be proposed to the Assembly for a three-day commenting period, after which the Chair can enact them under the same procedure as a passed bill (see Finishing a Vote). General Legislative Procedure
A general schedule for the journey of a bill to become law is set out in the Legislative Procedure Act.
The process begins with any legislator making a proposal for a bill, resolution, or appointment, after which the whole Assembly can debate and provide feedback on it ‒ perhaps someone even introduces a competing proposal, which gets important later on when opening a vote. If the Cabinet makes an Executive Order (not to be confused with regular "Cabinet Orders", which deal with small things such as allotment of Regional Officer slots!), it is considered automatically proposed to the Assembly. As Chair, you will have to ensure that discussion remains civil and orderly so that the proposal can be properly refined before being brought to vote! Before you can open a vote on a proposal, it has to be motioned by a legislator, and another legislator must second (back) this motion. You should regularly check the Assembly forum to be aware when such motions are made! Additionally, the respective mandatory debate time must have passed since the last edit was made to the motioned bill. With a provided sufficient reason (as judged by you), a legislator can however motion to waive this limit, but you have to wait 24h before passing the motion so objections can be raised ‒ if a legislator objects and gets seconded by another legislator, you may not pass the motion. On the other hand, you may also delay the opening of a vote for a reasonable time frame in case you believe that opening a vote at this time would preempt active debate or create scheduling problems. Executive Orders are to be put to vote automatically after their debate time, with no need to be motioned. For the remainder of procedures, they are then treated like any other bill. Once you have brought a proposal to vote, you can usually just wait until the voting period is over. In rare cases however, a legislator might motion to cancel voting on the proposal so that further edits can be made. Like with waiving debate time, they have to provide you a sufficient reason, and you have to wait 24h before making your ruling in order to allow other legislators to object. Until you have made a ruling on such motions, the proposal won't officially pass or fail, so don't worry about having to rush a possibly difficult decision without giving it the appropriate thought. When a bill's voting period is over, you count the votes and announce the results, officially passing or failing the proposal. If a proposal fails, there is a two-week ban on substantially similar (again, as judged by you) legislation being brought to vote, which you may waive under the same procedure as waiving debate time. Bringing a Bill to Vote
So, a proposal has received a motion and a second from two different legislators ‒ how do you go about opening that vote now?
Make Sure It's Legal to Vote
First of all, you need to verify that the proposal is eligible to go to vote: Check when the forum post containing the bill was last modified (usually, you can find a note at the bottom of the post telling you when that was) and whether the mandatory debate time, based on the type of proposal you're dealing with, has elapsed since then. If that isn't the case, the proposal can't legally go to vote yet ‒ either suggest to motion to waive discussion time instead, or just sit out the remaining time; in any case, you should give notice why you're not opening a vote just yet so legislators are informend and know you're active. If you wish to exercise your right to delay the vote for a bit, the same applies.
Furthermore, take a final look at the formatting of the motioned bill and confirm that it complies with the Law Standards Act. If there are violations, don't worry ‒ to ensure formatting compliance without the need for additional debate time, the Law Standards Act allows you to make such required edits to the bill yourself just before bringing it to vote! For transparency, you should note any such use of your powers in the voting thread. Create the Voting Thread
You've affirmed the motioned bill to be in proper formatting and confirmed the mandatory debate time to have passed, so you're good to open the vote: Create a new thread with all relevant information in the Voting Chamber subforum! Keep in mind that if there are two or more competing bills, you have to bring them both to vote at the same time, with a separate voting thread for each of them.
The legally required content of the thread's opening post is the proposal itself, as well as a countdown (using the Time and Date Live Countdown Timer site) to the conclusion of the vote. To keep things accessible for both present legislators and those looking at legislative history in the future, you should also include a link to the respective debate thread and note the proposal type as well as the resulting passage threshold (if two proposals compete, also mention the resulting additional requirements ‒ see "Closing a Vote"). For newer legislators, you might also want to explicitly mention how to vote ‒ direct to the poll, but a post in the voting thread with "Aye", "Nay", or "Abstain" is also an admissible (although uncommon) way to vote, as long as one doesn't vote both by poll and by post. Of course you can also just go ahead and copy the BBCode of a previous voting thread's OP and swap out details as needed. Before you can post the thread, you also need to set a title, which should start with a tag like "[AT VOTE]" to clearly signal the new vote. The title should also include the ID code for the vote (a string of letters and numbers noting the year, month, and number of the vote in that month) ‒ don't worry, this might sound complicated, but you'll get the hang of it easily: Simply start with "A", then put the last two digits of the current year (e.g. "21" for 2021) followed by two digits for the current month (e.g. "07" for July). After that, put a full stop and two digits to signal the number of the vote within this month (e.g. "01" for the first vote of the month, "02" for the second, …) ‒ and voilà, you should have yourself a vote ID looking something like "A2107.03"! Once you've figured out the vote ID, put it at the start of the title (behind your "[AT VOTE]" tag, if you set one). Also ‒ once again for clarity ‒ you should include the title of the debate thread in the voting thread's title, so copy it over quickly. That should be all you need for the voting thread's title! Usually, it'll now look something like this: [AT VOTE] A2107.03 Amending the Elections Act - 3(3)b. You're now basically good to go and post the voting thread! However, before doing so, make sure you have checked the box to attach a poll to the thread and that the number of options is set to 3. Also consider disabling your signature, as this is an official matter. When you post the thread, you will be taken to the poll configurations page: For the poll options, simply put "Aye", "Nay", and "Abstain"; the poll title should be something short like "Should this law/amendment/resolution be passed?" or "Should X be appointed/recalled?". Also make sure to check the box to make votes public, otherwise you won't be able to properly record legislators' votes later on! Once you've done that and confirmed the poll, the vote's live! For this part, there is an Assembly Auto-Formatter function! The input form for voting threads can be found here. Announce the Vote
These are no legal requirements, but quality-of-life favours for your fellow legislators. After you've posted the voting thread, also post a message linking to the new voting thread in the proposal's debate thread (something like "This is now at vote.") and edit the debate thread's title to include "[AT VOTE]" ‒ for this, either click and hold the thread title in the thread list of the Assembly forum, or make a full edit to the thread's opening post and change the content of the Title field there. You can also ping @Legislators in the #legislators-lounge on Discord with a short message that voting on the proposal has been opened and link the debate and voting threads. For legislators that aren't on Discord, you might want to additionally publish a NationStates Dispatch with similar content and ping legislators' nations in it.
The Auto-Formatter will also generate formatted suggestions for Discord and gameside pings. Closing a Vote
The voting time on a bill has run out and you're about to close the vote, or you have decided to pass a motion to cancel voting ‒ what should you do?
Compile the Results
Naturally, first of all, you'll need to check whether the proposal passed (if you're cancelling voting, this naturally won't be necessary). For that, calculate whether the number of Ayes, divided by the combined amount of Ayes and Nays, is above the passage threshold for the given type of bill. If two bills compete, only the one with the highest Ayes percentage ‒ discounting abstentions! ‒ passes (provided it reached the usual threshold), all others fail. Don't forget to check whether a legislator has voted both by poll and by post, potentially voting twice!
After you've determined the outcome, post it in the voting thread. This can be as short as "With X Ayes against Y Nays, the bill has passed/failed with whatever% support, discounting the Z Abstentions" or as detailed and graphically enhanced as @Amerion's Final Tallies ‒ if you want, you can just copy and edit the BBCode of earlier voting result announcements. You should then edit the debate and voting threads' titles to say "[PASSED/FAILED/CANCELLED/…]" instead of "[AT VOTE]", depending on the outcome of the vote. You can also make a short post in the debate thread (akin to when you opened the vote) saying something like "This has passed/failed." and link to the official announcement of the results. Posting a short message on Discord linking to the results would probably be a good thing to do too, but again, these are no legal requirements. For this part, there is an Assembly Auto-Formatter function! The input form for voting results can be found here. Hold Gameside Poll
If the Assembly has passed constitutional legislation which you find to substantially impact the gameside community of TSP, you must order a gameside approval poll on the bill.
To find a time window for the poll, contact a Local Councillor. They'll also need some details for creating the poll: It must run for the same duration as the Assembly vote and only allow native WA members to vote. The poll description should include a link to the respective voting thread (it's important that you have archived the voting thread by then, because non-legislators won't be able to view threads located in the Assembly's Voting Chamber!) as well as a short summary of the bill's content. Voters must have the option to vote Aye, Nay, or Abstain. You can provide the LC previous approval polls (such as this one) for reference. The result of the approval poll is calculated just like the result of the Assembly's vote; the passage threshold however is hard-coded by the Charter to be 60%. If the bill fails to be approved gameside, it doesn't become law, so further steps won't be necessary. You should announce the poll result to the Assembly in any case. Enact Passed Legislation
Alright, you've announced the voting results ‒ now it's time to actually make the bill law, so head to the MATT-DUCK Law Archive. Do note that recording treaties and changes thereto is the MoFA's duty; they have the power over the Mavenu Diplomatic Archive, which you don't, so in those cases you can skip the following. If the proposal in question failed or is an appointment/recall, you'll of course skip this step, too.
If completely new legislation was passed, you need to post a new thread in the MATT-DUCK. As title, just put the one specified in the bill. The post content should exclusively be the bill's content; however, you should remove the BBCode coloring the whole bill green as well as the [bill]/[quote] tags itself. After you've posted the new thread, you'll also need to write an entry for the law's legislative history, as it will get amended in the future and the post you just made then gets edited accordingly, slowly changing away the original bill. Therefore, write a reply to the thread you just posted to preserve the original version: This post should say something like "The [name of the law] was passed by the Assembly on [date]", link to the voting and debating threads for the law, and contain the full bill as originally passed (unlike for the thread's opening post, keep the bill wholly as-is here). Lastly, after posting the legislative history entry, you should make a short edit to the MATT-DUCK Law Index, which lists all laws that are currently in force within the South Pacific. Just search for the correct sub-section in its list and add the details of the new law in the same format as the other recorded laws. After that, you're done for this step! Otherwise, if this was just an amendment, you won't have to post an entirely new thread ‒ simply make an entry in the legislative history, just as if a new law was passed: A short sentence like "The following amendment to the [name of the law] was passed by the Assembly on [date]", a link to the debate and voting threads, and the full text of the bill fully suffice. Then comes the exciting part ‒ you get to edit the actual law to reflect the new amendment! Go to the opening post of the law's thread and click "Edit" (whether you do a full or quick edit doesn't really matter). Find the sections of the law that were changed, added, or removed, and carefully edit the text in line with the amendment: Remove everything that was marked as red strike-through and add everything that was marked in green in the passed bill. After you're done, click "Save Changes"/"Update Post" (depending on whether you're making a quick or full edit), and the law is updated! Lastly, should a law have been fully repealed, you again need to follow a slightly altered routine. First, just like with new laws and normal amendments, make an according post for the legislative history. However, you now don't just remove all content of the thread's OP ‒ instead, you need to archive the thread, which you do by moving it to the "Post-2016 Archived Laws" forum in the archives. A detailed description on how to move threads is included in the Other Duties > "Housekeeping" > Archive Inactive Discussions sub-section. After you've moved the law's thread, also make an edit to the MATT-DUCK Law Index, just like when a new law is passed. However, you naturally won't be adding a new law, and instead remove the entry for the repealed law. If you had a gameside approval poll held for a bill, you should in any of the above cases also link the respective poll in the record to the legislative history. Update the Legislative Activity Spreadsheet
The voting results have been announced and the law has been duly enacted. One last step remains to be done ‒ you need to update the Legislative Activity spreadsheet, which is important for both the monthly Legislator Check and easy-to-access recordkeeping. However, this is also one of the most tedious steps. (To gain editing access, contact @Farengeto.)
The easy part of this is making the entry on the main sheet ("Legislative History"), where all the Assembly votes since 2018 are listed. Scroll right to its bottom and enter the details of the vote in the same format as those recorded above it (you might have to append new rows, possibly also one for the header of the month ‒ simply use the input prompt right below the last row of the sheet to add the required amount): To get the total number of legislators (required for the "Number of Votes" and "Turnout" columns), open the current month's legislator roster sheet (simply named "[month] [year]"), click and hold on the first-listed legislator's forum name, and drag down until you've selected the forum names of all listed legislators. In the bottom right of your screen, you should then see a small label telling you how many cells you have selected ‒ this is, in this case, the current number of legislators. The "Number of Votes" is recorded as "[ayes + nays + abstentions]/[number of legislators]". "Turnout" is calculated by dividing the sum of Ayes, Nays, and Abstentions by the current number of legislators. After this, you'll need to record every single legislator's ballot in the respective vote. The first thing you have to do for this is add a new column to the current month's legislator roster (according to the Legislator Committee Act, votes are counted for the month in which they finish, so I suggest only creating this column once the vote is actually over), between the "Chair's Discretion" and "Number of Votes" columns of the "Voting Record" section. Right-click the "Number of Votes" column's letter at the top of the sheet and use the menu popping up to insert a new column to the left of it ‒ this way, the conditional formatting rules I set up to display legislator's votes in a matching color will get copied over. Enter the vote's ID in the orange header cell, and then you're set up for recording the individual ballots. There are several ways to tackle this. The likely easiest is to go through the list of Ayes, Nays, and Abstentions as displayed in the voting thread's poll results separately and write "Aye", "Nay", or "Abstain" respectively in the rows of the legislators listed in the poll, using the alphabetical sorting of both the poll results and the legislators' forum names on the roster sheet to your advantage. The Auto-Formatter for voting results automatically creates a copy-paste list of individual votes when you generate the announcement for a vote's result ‒ you can copy this list and paste it in the cell where the ballot of the top-most legislator goes, and you'll have the ballots of all legislators filled in instantly! Before you call it a day however, you should also check whether a legislator has an approved Leave of Absence for the time frame of the vote you're recording ‒ according to the Legislator Committee Act, they mustn't be considered absent (to not have voted) for such a vote, so putting a notice of some kind in the rows of those legislators will make sure you remember that they were excused for the vote when doing a Legislator Check later on! For all legislators on LoA for the entire duration of the vote, simply put "excused" where their ballot would go, unless they actually did cast a ballot in that vote despite their LoA ‒ then you of course record their actual ballot. Whew. That sure was a lot of writing. But why all this recordkeeping is necessary will become clear in the next section. Publishing States of the Assembly
The State of the Assembly is a monthly report from the Chair of the Assembly summarizing all official business that was conducted in the past month as well as providing the Legislator Committee with a recommendation on which legislators to revoke the legislator statuses of. It has to be published within the first week of a new month so LegComm can keep the deadline for revoking legislators' statuses. This section will provide you insight into and guidance for writing a SoA.
For this part, there is an Assembly Auto-Formatter function! The input form for SoAs can be found here. Conducting a Legislator Check
The heart of every SoA is the monthly Legislator Check ‒ you investigate every legislator's activity for the month and determine whether they're compliant with the legislator eligibility criteria laid out in the Legislator Committee Act. So, how do you do this?
Count the Votes
The Charter asks "active membership" of legislators ‒ of course, people don't have to talk all the time on the forums or on Discord to comply with this requirement, it's instead measured by looking at a legislator's vote attendance.
Checking the voting requirement for legislators is relatively straightforward. On the Legislative Activity spreadsheet, open the legislator roster sheet for the month you're evaluating, go through every row and count how many ballots the respective legislator has cast that month. Legislators who have been absent for (have not cast a ballot in) more than half of all votes in a month are non-compliant with the voting requirement. For example, if three votes finished in a month, any legislator who has been absent for at least two is non-compliant. If there were four votes however, being absent for two would still be counted as compliant ‒ two are exactly half of all votes, not more than half! Remember to not count legislators as absent for a vote if they had a LoA for the voting period ‒ if you mark such cases at the conclusion of the respective vote, this won't be a problem for you. Furthermore, legislators who were newly admitted that month don't have to comply with the voting requirement at all (other requirements, as below, still apply). If you have determined a legislator to be non-compliant in this point, write "Non-compliant" in the "Status" column under "Legislator Check", and put "Failed voting requirement" as the reason in the cell next to it. As the Chair, you are allowed to exercise leniency when it comes to the voting requirement. For example, if someone narrowly fails it but is otherwise compliant and very active on Discord or the RMB, you can choose to give them an official warning and mark them as "Compliant" instead, but in this case you should note this and your reasoning in the reason column. Verify Citizenship
The second requirement to keep one's legislator status is citizenship in TSP, granted by simply having a nation in the South Pacific on NationStates.
This is a somewhat tedious step ‒ after all, you're required to look at every single legislator and check whether they have a nation in TSP. On the legislator roster sheets, the registered nation for every legislator should be recorded in their row, usually as a clickable hyperlink. Thus, you can simply work your way down the sheet for the relevant month, using the links to open legislators' nation pages and check whether they're residing in TSP. If you see that a nation is no longer located in the South Pacific, write "Non-compliant" in the "Status" column and put "Nation moved out" as reason. Sometimes, a nation might just have ceased to exist ‒ naturally, it then also doesn't reside in TSP anymore (do check however whether the linked nation contains a typo, like a blank space at the end, which was accidentally put there by the Legislator Committee and thus incorrectly shows the nation as CTE, in which case you should immediately correct it on the sheet); again, mark the legislator as "Non-compliant", with "Nation CTEd" as the reason. A special case of non-compliance is resignation. If a legislator has publicly resigned over the course of the month (e.g. with a post in the Legislator Status Updates thread, in the #legislators-lounge on Discord, …), you also mark them as "Non-compliant" and put "Resigned" with a link to their statement of resignation as the reason. This would also override any other reason for non-compliance, so you don't have to conduct voting requirement or residency checks for legislators who resigned. If you want, you can also color the status and reason cells of non-compliant (or warned) legislators to graphically differentiate them from the compliant ones. All legislators who don't fail any of these requirements can be marked as "Compliant" in the "Status" column. For those, you also won't have to put anything for a reason. The SoA Auto-Formatter will automatically compile a report on which legislators have failed the voting or residency requirement, but you'll still need to manually mark legislators on the actual sheet. Write the Recommendation
After you're done with verifying the compliance status of every legislator, it's time to write out your results as part of the post you're going to make for the SoA.
This is best done in the form of a table, with each row containing a failing legislator, their nation, and the reason why you're recommending them for removal. So, begin to create a new table: The first row contains the table headers ‒ in this case, the first cell should say "Forum Username", the second "Nation in TSP", and the third "Reason" (naturally, you can vary those labels, they should however be clear and concise). Then, append new rows, one for each failing legislator. In a row's first cell, put their forum name in the form of a mention ("@[name]"); if the name contains spaces, numbers, or any other special characters, you need to surround it with apostrophes. In the second cell goes the name of their nation as recorded on the legislator roster spreadsheet, surrounded by [nation] tags. Finally, in the last cell, simply put whatever you entered as the reason on the legislator roster sheet before. Your final table should look something like this (from the October 2021 SoA): Code: [table=100]Include this table somewhere in your SoA, if possible together with an explanation of the compliance criteria as applied to the circumstances of the relevant month ‒ you can copy over an explanation from previous SoAs, but remember to swap out the parts mentioning the number of votes held to actually be the ones for the correct month!
The Legislator Committee will use this recommendation from you as the base of their final decision on who to revoke legislatorship from. They have the final say on this matter and may choose to exercise discretion and not remove a legislator you recommended to remove, or, the other way around, remove a legislator you opted to simply warn for non-compliance. Sometimes, they'll also entirely forget to remove legislators in time! Other Components
Now that you've completed the hardest part of creating your SoA, making a list of discussions active in the relevant month, a short summary of the votes held, and welcoming the new legislators will be a walk in the park
 Summarize the Votes Held
A report on the "State of the Assembly" would sure do well with a section about the votes that were held in the Assembly the past month, so here's how to put one together:
First, you of course need a raw list of the relevant votes. If you've kept the Legislative Activity spreadsheet up to date, this'll be as simple as scrolling to the relevant month on the main ("Legislative History") sheet and checking which votes are recorded there. Otherwise, look through the Voting Chamber (and, if you're archiving finished votes relatively quickly, the Vote Archive) and open all the threads with the last post being in the relevant month to get their details. Now, you can make a table with the relevant information about those votes: In the header row, put "Code" as the first cell, "Title" as the middle one, and "Result" as the last (like with the Legislator Check table, you're free to change the labels, but they should be comprehensible). For every vote held in the month, add a new row and fill in the vote's ID code, title (you can also make the title link to the respective voting thread for accessibility), and result (which you can also color to give it a little bit of touch). When you're done, the table should look something like this (from the October 2021 SoA): Code: [table=100]Traditionally, a short comment on the votes, outlining how many there were, what they were about, and whether they passed (you can follow the style of previous SoAs for this) is put before this table, and both get put as the first component of a SoA. If you want, you can also wrap the table in [spoiler] tags to reduce the clunkiness of the SoA, especially if there were a lot of votes that month.
List the Active Discussions
A parliament like the Assembly also holds a lot of discussions, not all of which end in formal votes ‒ therefore, a simple list of discussion threads that were active the past month is also included in a SoA.
This step is incredibly simple ‒ just go through the threads in the Assembly forum and the Private Halls subforum, copying the links to and titles of all discussion threads of which the last post falls into the month you're writing the SoA for! Organize this info into a BBCode list, with each bullet point being the title of a thread, linking to that thread. For threads in the Private Halls of the Assembly, you might want to put "[private thread]" or something similar instead of the actual title in order to maintain confidentiality ‒ but you as the Chair are the authority which decides what is released from the private subforums of the Assembly, so slipping up won't cost your head  . Your resulting list might look something like this (from the November 2021 SoA):Code: [list]This list can get pretty long if the Assembly is very active, so consider wrapping it in [spoiler] tags, like the table with the votes. Customarily, the list of active discussions is put after the section on votes.
Welcome Incoming Legislators
After making a list of who loses legislatorship, why don't also make a list of who newly gains it? A short welcoming message to the new legislators would be a nice gesture.
On the legislator roster for the relevant month, the Legislator Committee usually notes "new" in the "Chair's Discretion" column for newly admitted legislators, so you can find out who's new easily. To write the list of newcomers for the SoA, I continued the formatting choice of not putting them in a BBCode list like the discussions, instead mentioning them in an in-line format ("@[name] | @[name] | ...") ‒ this, as well as all other formatting described above, are of course simply stylistic choices, and this is your SoA, so in the end you can do it any other way you like ^-^ Attach the Roster PDF
Lastly, for easy access and posterity, you should attach a PDF copy of the relevant month's legislator roster sheet. This is fairly straightforward ‒ open up the that month's legislator roster sheet, hover over "Download" in the "File" menu, and click "PDF". You will be taken to a page where you can fine-tune the PDF file to download; for my SoAs I usually just set the format to be upright and kept everything else as-is. Clicking "Export" in the top right of your screen will then download the PDF, which you can attach at the bottom of the page when creating the SoA thread.
Other Duties
Votes and States of the Assembly certainly make up the bulk of the Chair's duties, but there are several smaller things you'll need to do (semi-)regularly. This section covers everything you have to know about those tasks and how to tackle them.
"Housekeeping"
The Chair is responsible for ensuring a smooth functioning of the Assembly, so naturally, things will have to get cleaned up once in a while. Primarily, dead discussions should be archived, and for yourself as the Chair, the Legislative Activity spreadsheet should be up to date.
Archive Inactive Discussions
According to the Legislative Procedure Act, the Chair is responsible for archiving inactive discussions as well as debate and voting threads of passed legislation. All threads in which no post was made since at least a month are considered inactive, and you're allowed to archive them at your discretion ‒ you should be doing this every once in a while, since a cluttered-up Assembly forum makes things harder to find for everyone. However, special threads (such as the Press Gallery) shouldn't be archived, because at times they will have to be posted in again, regardless of how much time has passed!
To archive threads, you first need to mark the threads you wish to archive ‒ you do this by checking the boxes at the very right of the rows of the threads you're targeting. Once you've done this, you have to select "Move / Copy Threads" from the drop-down menu below the thread list and then hit the "Go" button next to it (in the parentheses, the button should also tell you how many threads you have selected). This will take you to the moderation page, where you can select the destination of the move as well as the moving method. For the latter, choose "Move Threads" from the three possible options ‒ the default selection is to leave a redirect in the forum where the threads are currently located, which would clutter up the Assembly forum just like if the threads themselves remained there! The move destination ("New Forum:") must be set to the Assembly archive. This is somewhat tricky, because there are many, many forums in the drop-down menu to choose from ‒ the Assembly archive (named "Assembly of the South Pacific" as well) is best found scrolling up from the bottom of the list, right below "Fudgetopia Hall of Government". Once you've made these selections, you can click "Move / Copy Threads" to execute the move, after which you will automatically be viewing the forum where you moved the threads to ‒ you should be seeing them there then. Maintain the Spreadsheet
Keeping the legislator roster up to date being important has been mentioned in this guide a few times already, but it is definitely deserving of its own sub-section ‒ the roster is seldom used in public, but its behind-the-scenes impact cannot be understated! Having a clean record of everything decides how much time and mental capacity you're going to have to spend on many of your duties as Chair.
As described in the section about closing votes, the Chair primarily uses the spreadsheet to record the individual votes of all legislators so that Legislator Checks are easy to execute for the Chair and transparent for everybody else, a win-win situation. Additionally, you should record Leaves of Absence (see below) on the sheet to support you when copying all those individual votes so you don't accidentally mark someone as absent. In principle, the Legislator Committee is responsible for adding new legislators and all their details to the roster sheet ‒ however, they might forget small parts of this sometimes or even completely miss adding an accepted legislator to the sheet, and you going over the newly accepted applications in the Welcoming and Registration Centre every now and then certainly wouldn't hurt too much while greatly increasing the reliability of the sheet's data (you could also use this opportunity to personally welcome new legislators, you are the leader of the body they just joined after all!). Usually, you'll find new legislators at the very bottom of the sheet, so you might have to sort them in ‒ either click and hold in the number of their row and drag it to the appropriate place, or right-click the letter at the top of the forum names column and select to sort it from A to Z. The most common oversight of LegComm is not adding the link to the new legislator's nation to the cell with the nation name (or adding a link to their forum profile instead ‒ this should go into the cell with the forum name!), so you might have to correct that. If the legislator isn't marked as "new" in the "Chair's Discretion" column, you should also add that in to remind you later when doing Legislator Checks. Sometimes, formatting might also be off ‒ of course this is ultimately meaningless for the actual data, but at least I like keeping everything looking uniform, and perhaps you do too, so correct that if you so desire. When a new month begins and a new roster sheet is created for it (usually, LegComm does this when they have removed all the non-compliant legislators after you've published the State of the Assembly), you should also go through the "Chair's Discretion" column of it and remove any notes that are no longer relevant. Usually, that'd be the mentions of a legislator being newly admitted that month (and thus exempt from the voting requirement) and any Leaves of Absence that aren't active for the sheet's month. Furthermore, all the "(Non-)Compliant" notices and their reasons in the "Legislator Check" part should also be cleared, because they will all have to be re-evaluated at the conclusion of the new month. Your Approval Matters
Nice, right? Jokes aside, your approval as the Chair really does matter ‒ it decides whether a legislator gets removed for inactivity, a political party gets formally recognized, and even whether someone is guilty of Espionage or not!
Leaves of Absence
The Legislator Committee Act considers legislators with an approved Leave of Absence from the Chair present for all votes in the timeframe of the LoA.
Legislators who would like to have a LoA approved normally post their request in the Legislator Status Updates thread, mentioning the start and end dates of the duration for which they'd like to be excused as well as their reasoning (that can also be a private RL thing, in which case you shouldn't try to press for details ‒ after all, everyone is entitled to their privacy!). A legislator might also contact you privately to request a LoA in special cases. Either way, you should make a post in the Status Updates thread to publicly approve the LoAs. Nowadays, LoAs don't really get denied ‒ only in really obscure cases, like a ridiculously long time frame to be excused for, should you consider denying a LoA request. After you've approved a LoA, it'd be good to record it on the current month's legislator roster sheet to not forget it later on. In the "Chair's Discretion" column, simply note "LoA [start date] — [end date]" or something similar. Political Parties
This isn't too relevant as of writing this since there are no active political parties in TSP and it doesn't look like there will be anytime soon, but the law still has regulations on this topic. Namely, you as the Chair are responsible for receiving and evaluating petitions of political parties to receive their own public and private subforums or to have them un-archived.
The requirements you have to check if you receive such a petition are all laid out in the Political Parties Act. Most importantly, a political party is defined as any group of people organizing themselves for "political or electoral purposes". There is however also a membership requirement ‒ a political association must have at least as many members as "senior Cabinet officials" (at the time of writing, the Cabinet exists of the PM, MoC, MoD, MoE, MoFA, and MoM, amounting to six total senior officials). Associations fulfilling those requirements are considered political parties. However, to be eligible for subforums, a party must also field at least one candidate per year in an election. The High Court has ruled that a party can't receive a subforum before actually having fielded an own candidate in an election! Such active political parties are eligible for a public subforum and a private one. Once you have received a petition to have those created (or un-archived ‒ former parties who no longer meet the eligibility requirements can get their subforums archived by Forum Administrators), carefully verify the eligibility of the petitioning association. If you find it eligible, notify a Forum Admin that you've approved the petition and subforums for the party should be created / un-archived; otherwise, contact the petitioner and tell them why they're not considered a political party by law. Espionage
"Distribution of private information that originates in official South Pacific discussion areas, excluding private messages, without the express written permission of the relevant officials or institutions shall be considered Espionage." The Criminal Code makes you as the Chair the relevant official to grant such written permission for discussions on private Assembly venues!
For threads in the Private Halls of the Assembly, there is a semi-formal way for legislators to request releasing discussions: The Private Threads Declassification System. There, legislators can make a post if they'd like to have private threads released, usually using the application form code included in the thread's OP. You can then approve or deny the request at your discretion, but remember that transparency for the public is always a good thing, so you should approve the request if there is no harm to be done by releasing the requested threads. If you approve a request, move the respective threads to the public Assembly forum or the public Assembly archives, depending on the age of a thread. How moving threads works is described in detail in the Other Duties > "Housekeeping" > Archive Inactive Discussions sub-section. If you're asked to approve the release of discussion from somewhere else (like the #legislators-lounge), there isn't a definite way of giving your consent ‒ the only requirement is that it be written, so you'll have to decide for yourself where and in what fashion to express it. If it's just a casual thing to be released, a short comment to the #legislators-lounge might do, whereas for larger topics you might want to do it more formally, e.g. by posting to the Press Gallery ‒ but again, that's your call to make. Personal Projects
That's basically it for all your official duties that are set out in law (or derived from it)! However, as the head of the Assembly, you're free to run your own projects, be it for outreach, integration, or anything, really. Maybe you even promised to do such a thing in your campaign! Previous Chairs have started many projects, and maybe you'd like to continue some ‒ a list of all currently active Chair projects is located here.
Onboarding Deputies
Having one or more Deputy Chairs by your side can greatly increase the efficiency of the office while simultaneously decreasing the workload for every member of it ‒ and additionally, you can provide your deputies lively insight into the Chair's routine and let them experience it for themselves, possibly helping build future Chairs! This section will provide you a short introduction on how you can assemble a team of deputies by your side and work with them for a better Assembly.
Deputy Appointments
The Charter gives you as the Chair the right to freely appoint and dismiss your deputies. A nice gesture would always be to offer a possible opponent you might have had for your election the position of Deputy Chair, especially if they're a newer legislator who seems interested in the office. Another thing you could do to reach legislators who are principally interested in learning about being Chair but decided not to stand for election, is making a public announcement that you're looking for Deputy Chairs ‒ this is what my predecessor @Purple Hyacinth did, getting me to first become a deputy!
When you appoint a Deputy Chair, you must do it publicly, e.g. by making a post in the Press Gallery so everyone is aware of the current deputy roster. For my announcement, I also included a list of things that my deputies were allowed to do with their powers ‒ it's not entirely clear whether the Charter legally requires this, but I chose to do it simply to be safe and to keep everything transparent. You can use the reference list of Chair powers and duties at the start of this guide as base when writing out the extent of your deputies' powers. Maybe you'd also like to consult with them before making the decision alone (although this is definitely within your rights) ‒ give them a brief overview of powers and explain why you'd rather have some of their powers a bit more restricted than others (e.g. they have to inform you beforehand, you have to give explicit approval first, …). For this, you can usually set up a Discord group chat with them, as most legislators will have an account on the regional server ‒ quick and easy communication between you and your deputies will generally be important for the remainder of your term! Working With Your Deputies
Decide with your Deputy Chairs how you will work together for your term ‒ you could for example have a deputy completely in charge of one area (e.g. a special project, such as Deputy Chair @Moon was in charge of the Weekly RMB Updates during @Purple Hyacinth's tenure); you could do as much as you can alone and only have your deputies step in when you're unavailable; you could perform everything collectively with the first one of you that is available completing a task that came up; the possibilities are endless! Just make sure that everybody on your team knows their powers and when to exercise them.
And With All That Said…
… I'm free. Well, this certainly is a lot of text. To read as it was to write ‒ in fact, I even needed to compress my wording since I hit the character limit for forum posts… Covering everything the Chair of the Assembly can or must do and how to best go about it turned out to be a quite extensive project, so extensive that one term was not enough to get it all down. But here we are: A complete (I hope
) guide to Chairing! Hopefully your questions have been answered ‒ again, if you have any suggestions for improving it, contact the current Chair or @anjo.~ written by @Purple Hyacinth and @anjo in their respective terms, finished December 2021
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The following 13 users Like anjo's post:• Amerion, Belschaft, Domais, Eshialand, HumanSanity, Jay Coop, Moon, Not Austria, Pinel M, Purple Hyacinth, Somyrion, The Haughtherlands, Tishers [Nyxonia]
Table of Contents General Guidelines
The following points are intended as general guidelines. They are not set in concrete and the Chair may exercise leniency. However, all Legislators should attempt to abide by them so as to ensure an orderly operation of the Assembly.
First offences will consist of a warning. Subsequent offences will be subject to further penalties including but not limited to the suspension of Legislator privileges.[1] Frequent suspensions may be grounds for ineligibility if found appropriate in a fair trial by the High Court. Gravedigging
Gravedigging is the act of posting in a thread which has seen a significant period of inactivity — typically a month or more. If a Legislator wishes to restart the discussion, they should create a new thread and post a link in the Opening Post (OP) to the previous discussion.
Bumping
Bumping is to post in a thread to bring attention back to the discussion. It differs from gravedigging by the amount of time. Generally speaking, bumping a thread which is two to three weeks old is acceptable.
Disorderly Conduct
Legislators are to behave respectfully at all times. Degrading, rude, or otherwise inappropriate comments which occur in either within the Assembly's sub-forum or the Legislators' Lounge in Discord is not acceptable and will be acted upon by the Chair.
Voting
Legislators should cast their vote using the poll in a voting thread. This allows for the Chair to easily note their vote in the Voting Record. However, in instances when poll voting is not an option, Legislators should cast their vote by posting 'Aye', 'Nay' or 'Abstain' in the thread. Legislators should not vote by both poll and post.
The voting thread is intended solely as an avenue for Legislators to cast their vote in. Should a Legislator wish to comment on the bill, they should do so in the debate thread. That thread will be linked in the OP of the voting thread. If a Legislator does happen to post a comment in the voting thread, the Chair will move it to the debate thread. Citations
[1] Legislator Committee Act, Article 3. Legislator Checks, sub-section 4, stipulates: 'The Chair of the Assembly may order the Legislator Committee to suspend legislator privileges for disruptive members. Frequent suspensions may be grounds for ineligibility, if found appropriate in a fair trial by the High Court.'
Table of Contents Introduction
Welcome to the Legislators' Guide to the Assembly! This document aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the Assembly and its procedures to legislators and those looking to become one. Whether you're a citizen interested in what being a legislator entails, a new legislator trying to understand our legislative process, or just want to read up on some detail about the Assembly, you've come to the right place ‒ hopefully this guide will be able to answer your questions!
If you have noticed an error or have other suggestions for improving this guide, please feel free to contact the current Chair of the Assembly or @anjo. About the Assembly
The Assembly of the South Pacific (TSP) is the primary legislative authority of the Coalition. The principal function of the Assembly is to pass bills (a proposal for a new law or a change to an existing one). However, beyond legislating, the Assembly also serves as a place where:
Law-Making
The Assembly makes new laws or amends laws currently in place. To make or amend a law, a legislator first introduces the bill in the Assembly’s Main Chamber. Other legislators will then comment and make suggestions to the bill. After an appropriate amount of time, the bill can be brought to a vote. A bill becomes law if a certain majority (simple or supermajority) votes to pass the bill. However, if the bill affects the gameside community of TSP, it will additionally be voted on in a regional poll.
Formation of Government
The Cabinet of TSP is elected from among and by legislators. The Cabinet is responsible for managing crucial aspects of TSP’s governance, such as foreign, regional, and military affairs. A nation needs to be a legislator to both contest an election for a Cabinet position as well as vote in that election. Many successful candidates for Cabinet have previously contributed to the Assembly in meaningful ways, such as writing bills or participating in debates.
Oversight of Government
The Assembly acts as a check and balance on the Government as part of a Separation of Powers. A Separation of Powers is where different groups of individuals possess powers unique to each group, to avoid any one group from monopolizing power. In TSP, the Assembly makes laws, the Cabinet administers the region, and the High Court interprets and applies the law.
Legislatorship
Being a legislator allows you to debate and vote on our regional laws, as well as to vote in elections and run for office yourself. Attaining legislatorship is usually the first step you can take to contribute to the region and build up experience and a portfolio, which will be very useful for convincing others to vote for you when you run in an election.
Becoming a Legislator
Any person is eligible to become a legislator so long as:
Maintaining Legislator Status
In order to maintain their status as a Legislator, a person must vote in at least half of the votes each month, given that there were two or more votes that month.
There are three exceptions to this:
Process of the Assembly
Before a law can be passed by the Assembly, it needs to go through the whole legislative procedure. The infographic below goes over everything that happens before a bill can become law. Further information can be found in the following sub-sections!
Proposal
Any Legislator may introduce a proposal to the Assembly. Proposals can originate in two locations:
All bills proposed to the Assembly must be compliant with the Law Standards Act, which describes how the different parts of a bill have to be formatted. Those guidelines, as well as applied examples, can also be found below: Format of Bills
A fictitious law could look like this:
Format of Amendments
Amendments generally need to follow all the formatting rules for laws. However, due to their nature of changing parts of laws, there are additional rules on how to signal such changes to a law. A fictitious amendment could look like this:
Debate
Bills regarding:
The Chair may waive the minimum debate period if a Legislator motions for them to do so. This Motion must be Seconded by another Legislator. If there are no objections to the motion within twenty-four hours, the period may be waived. Vote
Following the completion of the minimum debate period, any Legislator may Motion to Vote. This Motion must be Seconded by another Legislator before a vote can commence.
Bills regarding:
Result
The Chair will finalize the vote by counting the votes and determining whether the bill has passed or failed to pass. They will inform the Assembly of the result and amend any existing law (if the bill was an amendment)
Management
The Assembly has two primary managers, namely the Office of the Chair of the Assembly and the Legislator Committee.
The membership roster for each of them can be found in the List of Officials and Dates of Elections in this thread. Office of the Chair of the Assembly
The Office of the Chair comprises the Chair of the Assembly themselves, as well as any of their appointed deputies.
Similarly to what a Cabinet minister is to their respective government ministry, the Office of the Chair is responsible for the day-to-day administrative management of the Assembly, which mainly consists of opening and closing votes on time, ensuring that the whole legislative process is duly followed by legislators, and providing for a constructive atmosphere in the Assembly. An in-depth breakdown of the Chair's duties, including guidelines on how to fulfil them, can be found in the Chair Guide in this thread. Legislator Committee
The Legislator Committee is the commission responsible for granting and revoking Legislator Status to members. It is a separate and independent institution from the Office of the Chair of the Assembly and has no political function.
Table of Contents
Introduction
This post contains a list of projects run by the Chair of the Assembly, along with short explanations about their goals and maintenance. The Chair may start, change, and drop projects at their discretion, and is encouraged to denote any changes in projects here. This was split from the Chair Guide in order to allow expansion, since the Chair Guide barely scraped by the character limit for forum posts.
Weekly RMB Updates
Status: Active This project is for outreach to gameside TSP, trying to raise awareness of and interest in the Assembly and regional government.
Basically, once a week, a post to TSP's RMB is made, detailing the most important happenings in the Assembly the past week ‒ sort of a mini-State of the Assembly, but less extensive! The format invented by Deputy Chair @Moon can be achieved by filling in the following template code as needed: Code: [b][u]Weekly Assembly Update[/u] ([weekday], [date])[/b]The last lines tie in with another project, the Assembly Gazette, and can be dropped if not needed. An applied example from my tenure would be the 03 January Update. However, you can of course play with the formatting, phrasing, and general content as much as you'd like!
The Assembly Gazette
Status: Active This project is for outreach to gameside TSP, trying to raise awareness of and interest in the Assembly and regional government.
Whenever something important happens in the Assembly, it is noted in the current Gazette dispatch (the current concept is to create a new dispatch whenever a new Chair assumes office), which can be retrieved from this list. Nations can subscribe to receive notices for such happenings via the Gazette Subscription Service. In order for such notices to be generated however, the ping list within the Gazette dispatch has to be cleared first and then filled again when the notice should be generated. Note: A remote access tool for the Chair to make Gazette updates quick and easy will be integrated into the relevant Assembly Autoformatter pages. The Chair Guide
Status: Active This project is aimed at educating new and/or interested legislators about the role of the Chair, as well as provide help to any Chair on how to do things effectively to save time and mental capacity.
The Chair Guide should include up-to-date information about all legal procedures for present and future Chairs. Thus, this project likely won't have to be actively maintained, save for when a bill is passed that changes aspects of legislative proceedings or the Chair's office as such. If that happens, the Chair should update the relevant sections. Its formatting naturally also is completely up to the Chair and can be changed if desired. This project is aimed at improved and increased transparency between the Chair and the Assembly and region, and also acts as another source of outreach to the gameside. The Chair's Briefing should include a legislator count, list of active voters and debaters, a summary of the Assembly and more importantly Chair doings, progress on Chair projects, and vote summaries. Some of the Briefing targets specifically the region and others the Assembly.
Table of Contents Introduction
Welcome to the List of Historical Chairs. This list seeks to provide a full record of the composition of the Assembly's presidium since the creation of the role of Chair of the Assembly in its current form, containing lists of all Chairs and their deputies as well as their respective tenures. Furthermore, a number of records set by officeholders are also included for the pleasure of the reader.
The TSP Wiki Article about the Chair explains the origin of the role of Chair as follows: TSP Wiki Wrote:The responsibilities of the modern Chair of the Assembly were originally administered by the Secretary of the Region. In the Great Council of late 2005 to early 2006, the role of Chair of the Council (now Assembly) was created to administer votes and laws, but the Secretary (then changed to Minister) of the Region also had this responsibility. To reconcile this contradiction, the Minister of the Region was given the role of Chair of the Assembly, which existed in the Charter as a set of responsibilities held by the Minister of the Region (who had no other responsibilities). The Minister of the Region was renamed on November 10th 2010 and the first person elected as Chair of the Assembly was Todd McCloud on 15 January 2011. This first election for the Chair marks the start for all data collected for the lists below. Historical Chairs of the Assembly
The Assembly is currently under its 45th Presidium and has seen an additional 12 transitional Acting Chairs. In total, 30 unique individuals have served as Chair, whether Acting or regular. The full spreadsheet with links to elections and stepdowns (where applicable) is available here.
Here are some records set by our historical Chairs:
Historical Deputy Chairs
In total, 26 unique individuals have served as Deputy Chair of the Assembly in 33 deputy terms. For the purposes of this list, a deputy's term lasts from their appointment until they resign, are dismissed, become the Acting Chair, or their appointing Chair leaves office. As with the list of Chairs, the full spreadsheet with links to appointments and stepdowns (where applicable) is available here.
Of course, there is a short record section for our historical Deputy Chairs, too:
Closing Notes
Assembling this list required quite some digging around in this and all our previous forums, and I couldn't find exact records for every single term ‒ especially on the question of deputies ‒ and thus there may be slight inaccuracies, but I did attempt to make it as complete and correct as I could. If you would like to correct some of the data or have additional information to incorporate, please contact @anjo.
Table of Contents
Introduction This document contains all current officials and the dates of elections for each office in the South Pacific. This document should be kept up-to-date by the Chair. N/E indicates that the position isn't elected. If you notice any errors or inaccuracies, please contact the Chair at Cryophoric#6034. Executive Delegacy
Cabinet
Independent
Legislative Chairship
Legislator Committee
Judicial High Court
Security Council on Regional Security
Coral Guard
Local Local Council
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Reference list of everything the Chair of the Assembly can or must do, including the sections of relevant laws![[Image: pNCox8S.png]](https://i.imgur.com/pNCox8S.png)
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