Entry Procedures

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Andreas the Wise
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Entry Procedures

Post by Andreas the Wise »

I know, I know, actually having agreed, written down policy is messing with national sovereignty etc etc ... but the fact that pretty much every nation has had a different entry process thus far, and that we have almost agreed on something but have nothing written down suggests to me that it would be worth having an agreed, written down "Entry Procedure." We're almost there, we just need the "writing it down officially" bit.
Agreed Entry Procedures to the Bastion Union
1. Prospective nations request admission.
2. Each Bastion Union nation has the right to raise an objection within a week.
3. If one or more objection is raised, the Bastion Union nations will vote whether to admit the nation or not.
a. If 2/3 or more of Bastion Union nations vote in favour of admitting the prospective nation, it shall be admitted.
4. If no Bastion Union nation has raised an objection within a week, the prospective nation shall be admitted.
5. Organisations and other non-national forums requesting top-level hosting can be added with the approval of one admin or the request of one Bastion Union nation.
5a. This approval can always be revoked by a decision to do so in the Situation Room.
1-4 are Farzan's original proposal with the number 2/3 agreed as the amount of votes required in favour. I've extended the wording to make it clear, but that's the only change.
5 is an addition which we have essentially been operating under, but just to confirm it. This is talking about things like Archipelago, MTO, Benancian Conference, Batavian Emergency Forum etc. 5a is just the clause to say that the people of Bastion can always revoke a decision to add something to the top level.

Can we agree on this and sticky it as something to use for future admissions stuff? If people don't like the way I've suggested 5 but are happy with the rest, I have no objections to dropping 5 and continuing to do that ad hoc; I'd just like to have 1-4 agreed.

Also, this would be the appropriate topic to consider the question of whether voting on these sorts of issues should be done by individuals on the forum and not nations.
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Daniel
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Daniel »

It's an acceptable procedure, though I did kind of like every Bastion nation citizen gets one vote :)
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Andreas the Wise »

I also prefer that myself.
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Octavius »

Looks good. :up1:
I can see the merits of such a system as well. *shrug*
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Jacobus Loki
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Jacobus Loki »

All well and good, except that the Nations are the members here. Shouldn't the "members" do the voting?

Besides, I don't like the idea of one malcontent forcing everything to a vote.
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Gerk »

The point of the voting is in case there is dissent. There's no point in voting if there's no dissent, it's just a waste of time. Voting only happens if it comes down to that as an approval process.

And you already know my feelings on individual voting.
And I just noticed that Andreas linked to the exact same post at the top of the page. Whatever.
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Harvey »

I too think this would be a great time to change the voting procedures to individual voting rather than national voting, and thus must object to the plan as outlined.
Besides, I don't like the idea of one malcontent forcing everything to a vote.
Well, if there's only one, they'll lose horribly. And if we do individual voting we can all vote here instead of in each individual nation, so that would streamline the process.

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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Jacobus Loki »

..........and eliminate multi-cits from voting on it multi-times in their nations, I guess....... :?
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Andreas the Wise »

Jacobus Loki wrote:All well and good, except that the Nations are the members here. Shouldn't the "members" do the voting?
Yes and no, depending how you look at it. When we started, all the decisions were done by discussion (and generally relative consensus) of the people on the forum, without any mention of 'national' positions - the idea being that its us using the forum and its us who are affected by these decisions, rather than nations. You can look at it the other way too, but on the first look, it's the community that uses the forum, not the nations.
Besides, I don't like the idea of one malcontent forcing everything to a vote.
I thought about this. If we changed it to individual voting (and the views seem to be in favour of that at the moment), we could make it so that you need more than one person objecting to force a vote.

Feel free to discuss the exact, number, but it could look like:
Agreed Entry Procedures to the Bastion Union
1. Prospective nations request admission.
2. Each Bastion Union citizen has the right to raise an objection within a week.
3. If four or more objections are raised, the Bastion Union citizens will vote whether to admit the nation or not.
a. If 2/3 or more of Bastion Union citizens vote in favour of admitting the prospective nation, it shall be admitted.
4. If less than four Bastion Union citizens have raised an objection within a week, the prospective nation shall be admitted.
5. Organisations and other non-national forums requesting top-level hosting can be added with the approval of one admin or the request of one Bastion Union nation.
5a. This approval can always be revoked by a decision to do so in the Situation Room.
Underlines show the changes only significant changes is changing 'nation' to 'citizen' in voting stuff, and 'one' objection to 'four' being the trigger point. The are/have is purely to make the grammar now flow.
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Nathan »

I've long been in favor of having national votes... but now that we have grown and multi-cits are more common, I think we should switch to individual voting as well.

I think Andreas' newest citizen proposal works fine. Four is a fair number of objections.

Only concern is that the wording makes it sound like we are citizens OF the Bastion Union ;) but otherwise perfectly fine. I'd vote for it.
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Jacobus Loki »

Perhaps some disclaimer that this is for forum administration only, and does not impinge, etc., etc.
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Andreas the Wise »

If either of you have suggestions for actual wording that would do that, I'm more than happy to change the wording :)

EDIT: Wait, slight problem. If we change it to citizens voting, would we want to specify that it's "2/3rds of citizens who vote" need to approve it, or 2/3rds overall (just that might require a more rigorous removing inactive citizens thing). I would assume 2/3rds of citizens who vote, and maybe set some time period like two weeks for the vote, to give plenty of time but also a firm cutoff point.
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Nathan »

Agreed Entry Procedures to the Bastion Union
1. Prospective nations request admission.
2. Each citizen of a nation hosted by the Bastion Union (hereafter referred as a "Bastion Individual") has the right to raise an objection within a week.
3. If four or more objections are raised, the Bastion Individuals will vote whether to admit the nation or not.
a. If 2/3 or more of Bastion Individuals vote in favour of admitting the prospective nation, it shall be admitted. This percentage will be calculated using only the number of Bastion Individuals voting for a particular admission vote.
4. If less than four Bastion Individuals have raised an objection within a week, the prospective nation shall be admitted.
5. Organisations and other non-national forums requesting top-level hosting can be added with the approval of one admin or the request of one Bastion Union nation.
5a. This approval can always be revoked by a decision to do so in the Situation Room.
I've also included the specification that only voting citizens are counted towards the 2/3 instead of all citizens since I agree, it would be hard to coordinate an activity census.
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Andreas the Wise »

Looks very good :mrgreen:
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Gerk »

I was going to recommend making the number of objections required lower, then I realized that there are plenty more than twelve people here, so that should be a fine number.

I'm fine with that as it stands. My next concern is what about removing nations from the forum because of inactivity, or general non-agreeableness from their citizens? I don't expect we'll really have to use it, but should we outline a policy for that? Or should we just cross that bridge when we come to it?
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Andreas the Wise »

Removing people for inactivity is generally fairly non-controversial (at least in the Oscland case). If they're really inactive, they won't have any citizens left around to protest and say "No, we're active!" Removing nations because we don't like their citizens sounds rather controversial - let's cross that bridge if we come to it, and hope we don't come to it.
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Gerk »

Sounds good to me. I wasn't aware it had happened to a nation here.
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Jacobus Loki »

Yes, let's cross that bridge when we come to it, gods forbid. I don't see that kind of nation getting in anyway.
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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Farzan Shahanshah »

I have a few concerns.

1. Putting citizenry as the voting body above the nations themselves is quite a big change in the structure of the Union as it pools sovereignty elsewhere;
2. Citizen voting would provide insufficient protection for smaller or multi-citizen countries;
3. The logistics of a citizen vote are considerably more difficult than a national one;
4. The one-week period may be a bit too short if we're doing a national vote, unless "objection" is better defined (don't let it be said that I exempt myself from criticism).

EDIT: There's also another concern. Those of us who occupy relatively apolitical roles would be put in a difficult position if there were a citizens-wide vote. We'd either have to enter the fray, which compromises our impartiality, or have to abstain, which would hamper a nation's voting ability.

I understand where Andreas is coming from in terms of suggesting a citizen-wide vote, but I disagree with the logic behind it, even if an attempt to clarify an argument is always welcome. Though Bastion runs as an OOC entity, the organisations that constitute it are nations in their OOC capacities. The union is by nations, for nations, and the forum is run for their benefit, not the individuals who at any point may constitute it. This is indicated by the proposal that voting rights would only be acquired through membership of an individual nation. Decisions have to be by reference to the practicalities of running the constituent nations, and the deciding power should therefore remain with the nations themselves.

I don't particularly see why this process would take any longer, in the case of a controversial admission, than a citizenry-wide decision. Indeed it might go faster as individual nations have procedures and processes in place to make such decisions relatively quickly.

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Re: Entry Procedures

Post by Gerk »

1. This point is rather unclear. What exactly is changing about the structure, why does it matter, and, most importantly, is that change good or bad? I would ask you to better clarify this so that I can understand where your concerns are coming from on this matter.
2. Yes, this is true. But, being as it is that both I and Andreas, the two remaining active citizens of Gralus (besides a small handful of others who don't ever look at what's going on in the general forums) are in support, I wonder if this concern is misplaced. I'm not entirely sure 'protection' is a good word to use in this application, seeing as it is that the only way small countries would be needing protection through an admission process is if the country being admitted was hostile to them. And I don't think a country that is openly hostile to a member of this community is going to be admitted.
3. I would disagree with this. In a citizen vote, everybody is voicing their concerns and coming to decisions in the same place. The way we've been doing admission voting, I have no idea what most of the objections are, because they're off in other countries' forums, and sometimes they're linked to, and sometimes not, which makes it hard for me to understand what's going on in the decision-making process. It's much easier to count items when they're in a single pile than when they're in small piles in different rooms. If it comes down to it, the easiest thing to do in my opinion would be, if necessary, to create a separate topic for voting apart from the original discussion topic, so that votes are easily found and tallied.
4. I somewhat agree with this myself, but I'm not sure what a good time limit would be to both ensure the process goes smoothly, but expediently.

As to your final concern, I don't see how it applies. Bastion is not a political entity, so why should anyone view decisions made about Bastion as political?

The ability of any citizens to run their nation is not going to be (or, rather, *should* not be) affected by the admission of another nation. Nations do not interfere with each other on Bastion politically. So I would argue the reverse, that the deciding power in the case of admission of new nations should not be with the member nations, but with the individuals that make up the forum community instead.

The reason voting rights for this decision are granted by citizenship to a member nation of Bastion is because it indicates individual membership to Bastion itself. We don't really have a function for individual Bastion membership (should we? future discussion, perhaps?), so this is the best we can do at the moment to define who should be able to provide input on decisions regarding Bastion.
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