Moderator: SC Moderators
The SC certified the results of the CDS RA election at their meeting today. The results are as follows:
Simplicity Party: 3 reps: Cindy Ecksol (LRA), Soro Dagostino, Robert Galland
DPU: 2 reps: Sonja Strom, Pip Torok
CSDF: 2 reps: Arria Perreault, Gwyneth Llewelyn
Congratulations to you all and thank you to the SC and all the candidates for your time, dedication and service.
Congratulations to the Simplicity Party for retaining leadership of the Representative Assembly for a second term, and to Cindy Ecksol for winning the Leader of the RA position. 
I would like to thank everybody who supported the Democratic Pragmatist Union (DPU) and returned Pip and I to the RA as their representatives! Thank you for your trust in us. 
Thanks also in general to everybody who participated in the elections and voted, and especially to Jon Seattle for organising them.
Congratulations to the successful candidates and to our new LRA Cindy Ecksol. Thanks to Jon and to the SC for their work in organising and running our elections.
Could we see the breakdown of the vote asap please so that we can see the distribution of the vote and how the seats were calculated?
SP (First Ranked = 17, Borda Score = 43, seats = 3)
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Cindy Ecksol: 43
Soro Dagostino: 39
Robert Galland: 20
DPU (First Ranked = 10, Borda Score = 39, seats = 2)
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Sonja Strom: 26
Pip Torok: 23
Mikelo Serevi: 11
CSDF (First Ranked = 12, Borda Score = 35, seats = 2)
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Arria Perreault: 19
Gwyneth Llewelyn: 17
Thanks on behalf of the Simplicity Party faction, and congratulations to all who were elected to RA seats. And a special welcome to the already-selected reps from Al Andalus: Micael Khandr, StuiChicanne Darkstone, Carolyn Saarinen, and Wasp Thor. They will soon be joined by two others, and I'm looking forward to working with everyone in our newly-expanded RA.
It took about an hour after hearing the election results and the determination of the SC regarding the number of Al Andalus reps for me to realize that while I probably could do a fair job of chairing an RA meeting with seven reps, a meeting with 13 is going to be exponentially more difficult, at least if we assume that we're going to use the same methods as we have been. For instance, just the "simple" task of keeping track of who is queued up to speak next could consume all of my attention. A contentious issue could fill our windows with text streaming by too quickly to read, and keeping meetings to a reasonable length could become impossible.
Fortunately I've had another little project going that has kept me busy these past few months looking at technology tools designed to facilitate meetings and decision-making in Second Life. Some of the things I've learned about will be appropriate for helping us create engaging and productive RA meetings, and I fully expect to experiment with them as we move into this next term. I'm actually thinking that the RA may be the only decision-making group of its particular type meeting regularly in Second Life, so we're going to be somewhat out on the experimental edge with this. I find that pretty exciting, and look forward to working through this with a group that is motivated towards results-oriented meetings. We are likely to learn some things about running decision-making meetings in Second Life that will turn out to apply to our real lives as well.
More on this as soon as I've had a chance to think a bit more about what kind of technological assistance I'd like to have to run meetings with 13 people and a rich agenda and match up some of the tools with those requirements. But in the meantime, if you are personally familiar with any in-world meeting facilitation tools, I'd love to hear about them.
For now, I'll just offer a brief salute: Here's to a successful 10th RA term!
Cindy
Let me also add my congratulations to those elected, and thanks to everyone willing to serve.
It's nice to see the community's recognition of the hard work and good leadership that Cindy and Soro provided, this last year, clearly reflected in the votes. However, please note, all of our RA members this term have served diligently and well; we also owe warm thanks to our departing RA members and long-time CDS contributors Patroklus Murakami and Brian Livingston.
As Cindy notes, congratulations also to the four representatives elected by Al-Andalus, announced here. Our incoming estate will designate two more, as our SC acted to certify yesterday, for a total of 13 RA members in the 11th term representing about 130 CDS voting citizens, a new high for us.
And speaking of "incoming", we are hoping to see the land move tomorrow. More details, and party plans imminent :) Watch the Events thread on the latter. Regards, JP
Do we know when the next RA meeting will be 
There is a reference to it being on the 26th of July here: http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2494
and another reference to it not being then here: http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php? ... 495#p13531
The Leader of the RA Soro has suggested that the Representative Assembly not have a meeting tomorrow in an Announcement (which can not be responded to) here:
http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2507
It would be ok with me for us to not have an RA meeting tomorrow.
That would make the next meeting of the RA go to the 2nd of August, described here: http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2506