Do The Hokey Pokey

Sorry for the lame title of this post, but I thought I should make it something entertaining rather than boring. If you have no idea what it’s a reference to, check here

Anyway, back to the serious stuff.

I’m Omber Zombie aka Oz, or El Presidente Gallente to some. I’m running for a CSM position, ideally for the Chairperson position. I figure I may as well aim high. Some of you may know of me, I’m guessing most probably don’t. This thread isn’t really going to help give you a backstory on my life in eve, you can check my blog for more of that, but suffice to say, I’ve been here a long time and done a lot of various things and I think (and I hope you will think too) that I am the man for the job.

As you may, or may not, have noticed, I’m running under the campaign of ‘No major political leanings, happy to listen to everyone (even the conspiracy theorists)’ A lot of people seem to have issues with people saying they aren’t biased and neutral about things. I can understand that concern as everyone has some form of bias, it’s an inherent nature of us being human. So, I thought I would try and clarify my position and thoughts on the CSM in general with this wordy and lengthy post. I’ll try and keep it below Jade™ length, but it probably won’t be.

1. What is the CSM?
To me, the CSM is about distilling the communities fears, desires and angst down to key issues and changes to be presented to CCP by a council of democratically elected peers. Its’ mandate is to pass on community desires (or at least the 5% who voted agreeing with the issue) not debate their own pet projects.

2. Who should you vote for?
The obvious answer is me of course :p But, that comes with a caveat. Don’t vote for me if you don’t think I can represent the community as a whole. To me a candidate should be able to argue for or against any topic raised at the CSM meetings. They need to be informed, experienced, and to be able to critically analyse the topics raised. They need to love eve for what eve is, and what it could be. If you see that in a candidate, but don’t agree with their position to a specific topic, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t vote for them. Vote for their ability to argue a case, for or against.

3. What power will the CSM members actually wield?
A lot of people have written the CSM off as pre-nerfed or toothless. Others have stated that it’s just a free trip to Iceland for a bunch of celebrities. They are wrong. How’s that for a stance?
Now, let me clarify - you, the players of eve, are voting 14 people to represent you to CCP. There’s a lot of responsibility there, both from the community at large for electing the ‘right’ people for the job, and for the people that do get elected in representing the community faithfully. Of course at any point CCP can just veto an idea, but this will be the first time that they have to give a reason for that veto. What about the NDA I hear some people ask - well, unless CCP want to make a complete mockery of themselves not just to us, but to the general public, I’m guessing there is going to be very little they won’t be able to elaborate on for fear of turning the CSM into a pure publicity stunt that will horribly backfire. I guess I’m optimistic on that one.

now that I have that out of the way…

4. Why doesn’t Oz have a pet topic?
I do, but it’s the CSM itself. I have some severe issues with it’s current structure that I want changed. The details are as follows:

a. The voting system is flawed. The current structure doesn’t allow people to weight their voting. For instance, I like Hardin, I would vote for him, but as I only have a single vote, I’ll be voting for me. If the voting system was changed to a preferential system (specifically A Borda Count you would see a more balanced vote across the community rather than specific power blocks voting in their candidates. Then there is the tied vote issues, or the lack of votes issues under the current system. What happens if 3 people all get 5000 votes - are they all the chairman? What if only 8 people get votes, the rest 0 - how do you get the other 6 members of the council?

b. The chairman should be selected by the council, not by the person who gets the most votes in a general vote. You elected the council to represent you as a combined unit, yet they cannot even select their own chairperson?

c. 2 weeks of voting - can we change our votes over the two weeks? What if I decided to vote for someone on day 1 of the vote casting period, and that candidate drops out- is our vote now null? What if I change my mind? This either needs to be changed to allow us to change our votes up until the last second, or we are given a single weekend to cast votes. As most people know, 2 weeks is a long time in eve.

d. The lack of a CSM campaign forum. At the moment, players are being forced to create out of game websites, threads to collate other threads and generally, spamming of the eve general forums. A CSM forum was promised, but how hard is it to implement a single forum to the actual campaign, where all the campaign threads can be kept and people can go to look at all the information without having to resort to searching through the forums needlessly?

and that leads on to…

e. “A dedicated electronic forum will be provided for voters to formally present
issues to CSM Representatives. Because this is a “gathering place” where topics
deemed important to society are heard and acted upon by democratically elected
Representatives, moderators must be present to keep discussions civilized,
ordered, relevant, and lawful.”
Who is doing the moderating? Are you giving CSM members the power to moderate that section of the forum, or are you limiting their power by having CCP employees moderate a section of the forum that should be open to any and all ideas? Who decides what is relevent and not relevent? Wouldn’t having CCP moderators in this section mean that they are removing this community based decision making from the community?

f. “A meeting is not considered valid unless seven council members—in any combination
of Alternatives and Representatives—are present.”
Does this mean you can have a meeting without both the Chairman and Vice-Chairman? Hell, you could have a meeting witout both of those and both the secretary and vice secretary too. What kind of a minimal requirement is that? My suggestion is that a meeting would not be valid unless one of the Chairman or Vice-chairman is present along with at least one of the secretary or vice-secretary.

g. “The time limit of seven days applies to both Representatives and voters, meaning that a Representative cannot bring a topic up at a Council meeting without having it go through deliberation on the public forum. A 5% voter support is however not required for a Representative to bring up a topic to the Council.”
Wait a second, so a topic can’t be brought up at a council meeting uless 5% of the population vote for it to be brought up, unless of course a representitive wants to? Why bother having the vote at all?

h.“After each CSM member presents their opinion to support or disprove a motion, the matter is brought to vote; a majority rule passes the issue for escalation.”
Again we have an issue here - the ‘minimum’ requirement for a meeting was 7 members, what if 8 turn up and there is a tied vote? Does the chairman get the deciding vote? Or the vice-chair if he’s not present? What if neither are present? What’s the order of precedent here?

~~

I think that about sums up my issues for now. Again, I apologise for the length, but this is my pet ‘issue’ and I would love to see some feedback on it from everyone as my goal is to get this CSM to work whether I am elected to the council or not.

cheers,
Oz

Application Confirmed

I got an email today from CCP Xhagen confirming my application for candidacy in the CSM. \o/ More infor was given, but will be posted to the general public today/tomorrow.

oz