Some changes in the voting threads and recommendations
Greetings everyone,
I would like to announce some changes in the Ministry's operating model with regards to voting threads and voting recommendations. The changes have been discussed with and agreed upon by all of the Ministry's staff.
The previous operating model of the Ministry was as follows: For every new resolution in queue, Ministry staff would create two threads. One thread would be private to staff only, and would be used to discuss the resolution and draft a voting recommendation. The other thread would be public, and would be used for posting a voting recommendations, for members to vote, and for any public discussion on the resolution. In applying this model, we encountered two issues. First, the model inherently encouraged the Ministry staff, our WA experts, to post only in the private threads for recommendation drafting and not in the public threads. Second, it proved very impractical for voting recommendations to be ready before a resolution goes to vote in-game.
These two issues resulted in expert discussion on resolutions by our staff taking place in private, where the voting public had no access to it. The public threads, on the other hand, frequently had no discussion at all and were used exclusively for voting. As a result, early votes in the public thread and by extension our in-game early vote were not at all influenced by the opinions and commentary of our WA experts. Given the importance of our early vote due to the lemming effect, to a large extent this made our experts' commentary useless. Furthermore, the combination of these two issues made it more likely that the Delegate's actual vote and the voting recommendation produced by the Ministry's experts and distributed to our WA nations would disagree with each other. Such discrepancies have the result of making the voting recommendations less effective in directing the in-game vote of our WA nations.
The reduced impact of our experts' input, the lack of discussion in public threads, and the reduced effectiveness of voting recommendations on how our nations vote are all negative consequences that we hope the new model will address. Specifically, the Ministry will no longer be holding private discussion threads for recommendation drafting. Instead, the Ministry staff will be posting their comments directly in the public threads, shortly after those are created. Furthermore, voting recommendations will now specifically take into account the forum vote, and will only be distributed region-wide once there is a clear view of what the forum vote is.
We hope that the above changes will encourage more discussion in the public threads, that they will increase the influence of our experts' input on our forum voters and the regional vote, and that they will reduce the likelihood of discrepancies between the voting recommendations and the forum and delegate's vote. We have already been applying the new model in the last four votes (two in the General Assembly and two more in the Security Council), and the results have been encouraging.
In addition to the above, I have made some amendments to our World Assembly voting policy, to emphasize the discussion aspect of the forum threads.
Sincerely,
~r3naissanc3r
Minister of World Assembly Affairs
