I highlight below the changes made by this amendment, using BBcode annotation:
Legal Code Chapter 6 Section 6.1:
10. The Speaker's office will promptly remove any Regional Assembly members whose removal is ordered by the Court, whose North Pacific nation leaves or ceases to exist, or who fail to log in to the North Pacific forum for over 30 days.
11. Unless a notice of absence was submitted to the Speaker's office before the conditions of this clause apply, the Speaker's office will promptly remove any Regional Assembly members who fail to log in to the North Pacific forum for over 30 consecutive days; or who have not voted for 20 consecutive days and have missed four consecutive, as determined by the time they were commenced, votes, excluding election votes for all purposes under this clause.
The purpose of this amendment is to effect an additional activity requirement for RA members. RA members will lose their membership if they miss four consecutive votes
and have not voted for 20 consecutive days.
Please, take some time to parse the exact condition for removal carefully. It is a conjunction of two conditions, and a member loses their membership only if they fail both. There are a few reasons for the conjunction:
- It means that if four votes are brought simultaneously and someone misses all of them, they will not lose their membership, as that would be unfair (that way, a member could lose their membership for being busy for a single week).
- It also means that, if a month goes by without any votes having taken place, again nobody loses their membership.
- It retains the flexibility in scheduling votes Speakers currently have: they do not need to be concerned about spacing them out because of this clause. It also prevents Speaker abuse, as they cannot get members removed by congesting votes.
- The proposed wording does not require any complex definitions of "consecutive votes" or "votes in a row". Because there is the additional condition that you need to not have voted for 20 days to be removed, we can just sort them as consecutive using their commencement times.
The bill makes another change. It legislates that activity-based removal conditions (the voting-based proposed one, and the one already in the books requiring logging in on the forum once every 30 days) are not applicable if a member has posted a Leave of Absence notice. I do not think this second change needs much justification, so I will move on to discuss why I believe reintroducing the voting activity requirement is desirable.
Currently, all it takes for one to maintain RA membership, activity-wise, is to keep a puppet in TNP and log in on this forum once every 30 days. One can maintain their membership without having to make any single contribution to the region; not even a post.
As a consequence, the RA membership logs are filled with inactive members who come, apply and get RA membership, and then do nothing without fear of being removed. You only need to take a look at our
membership logs: the RA has consistently on the order of 80-90 members (exactly 80 at the time of posting); yet, we get only 30-40 votes in most votes. In fact, it was recently reported unofficially (on IRC) that approximately twice the members that usually vote in the RA sign on the forum regularly (at least once every three days); meaning that about half the regularly visiting members just do not bother to vote.
Even if one does not object to someone enjoying the rights of RA membership without contributing, we cannot ignore the dangers created by these inactive members.
First, all these inactive members create problems in the legislative process. During the current Speaker's term, a bill did not reach quorum and therefore failed to pass (despite the fact that a majority of the votes cast were in support). One other vote came close to not reaching quorum. Given that quorum is a requirement that we take as granted will be met, and we use to protect against gross abuse and inactivity, this is unacceptable. An activity provision requiring regular voting, such as the one I propose, would address this issue by pruning inactive members.
Second, the lax activity requirements open us up to undue external influence. One can get membership, lurk around without doing anything, and only show up to vote on a controversial issue, in order to skew the results of the vote in the direction favoring the group outside TNP said member supports. Late last year we had an incident during which, depending on who you ask, such "vote piling" took place at a large scale. Regardless of their interpretation of the events, a majority of the regional members recognized the need for additional measures to be taken to prevent this from occurring. The proposed change is, I believe, a reasonable and effective such measure. Regardless of what criteria each member uses to vote, at least their right to vote will have come only with some contributions to the region. The rest will be pruned.
I would also like to preemptively address some of the concerns commonly brought up when this change has been discussed in the past:
- Some members may decide not to vote, for one reason or another. For instance, judges often consider it inappropriate to vote. In those cases, people can just vote "abstain", which would satisfy the activity requirement. In other cases, a member may not want to publicly take a stance on a matter, and prefer to stay perfectly invisible, including not even posting an "abstain"; this may be, for instance, because they are simultaneously under pressure by two sides to make a choice. Yet, I believe it is unreasonable and unlikely that they will have legitimate reasons to do for four consecutive votes, or for all the votes taking place in a period of 20 days.
- Often, people bring up the RL argument. We all have real lives, and they can get exceedingly hectic over certain periods (exams for students, business circumstances for professionals, family or health emergencies for everyone). This is ameliorated in the current proposal by allowing for the submission of leave of absence notices. Even if one is overwhelmed enough to neglect to post a notice, let's be honest, making a single post once every 20 days is not that extreme an activity requirement. And, finally, even when RL circumstances are truly so severe as to make even this impossible, one can just reapply for membership and get re-admitted immediately (given that they will have reverted to citizenship status, and security checks will not be necessary).
Finally, I would like to acknowledge discussions with Crushing Our Enemies and Eluvatar for their input in this proposal.
